The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History)

by Craig L. Symonds

  The wrecked and burning Japanese heavy cruiser Mikuma as photographed by Lieutenant Junior Grade Cleo Dobson on June 6. She sank soon afterward. (U.S. Naval Institute)

  Walt Rodee led the Hornet’s second strike and found the smoking and burning cruisers at about 2:30 in the afternoon. The Mikuma was dead in the water and burning furiously. The Americans hit it again and put another bomb into the Mogami, while strafing the two destroyers. Both cruisers were now badly hurt, but the Mikuma was in extremis, burning from end to end. On the radio net, one pilot blurted out, “Look at that battleship burn!”36

  Back on Enterprise, Shumway and Short were pleading with Spruance to let them go back out for another strike. Spruance was pleased by their enthusiasm but uncertain what a fourth strike would accomplish. It was late afternoon by now, the target was getting closer to the envelope of air cover from Wake, and Spruance had to consider the fuel situation. As his destroyers had run low on fuel, Spruance had sent them back one by one to the fuel rendezvous site, and he now had only four destroyers left to accompany his two carriers. Finally, given the pilot reports, it was not clear that the target was worth another strike. In fact, Spruance did not know for sure what the target had been. Shumway thought they had hit a battleship and a cruiser; Short reported that both ships had been cruisers. Johnny Neilsen joined the group and Spruance turned to him to ask what kind of ship he had hit. “A heavy cruiser,” Neilsen answered. “Very much like our own Indianapolis class.”* Spruance asked him whether he was sure it wasn’t a battleship. Nielsen told him he was positive it was a cruiser. 37

  In the end, Spruance decided against a fourth strike, but he did send out two Dauntless bombers to reconnoiter and to take photographs of the damaged enemy ships. Flying one of those scout bombers, Lieutenant Junior Grade Cleo Dobson arrived at the coordinates and saw the wrecked and burning Mikuma with “lots of bodies lying on the deck, and lots more were lying on the stern.” There were also “about 400 to 500 saliors [sic] in the water all around the ship,” he recalled. On the way out, he had decided that if he saw any survivors in the water, he would strafe them, as the Japanese had done to American survivors. When he saw those heads bobbing in the water, however, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “Boy I would hate to be in the shoes of those fellows” he remembered thinking. “I might be in their shoes some day” He took his photographs and flew back.38

  As it turned to full dark on June 6, Spruance assessed the value of continuing the pursuit. Despite the remarkable successes of the past three days, there were a number of reasons for caution. By the time the sun came up on June 7, whatever targets were left would very likely be protected by landbased air from Wake Island, and with tired pilots, low fuel, and only four destroyers on hand, he decided to call it off. As he wrote later, “I had a feeling, an intuition perhaps, that we had pushed our luck as far to the westward as was good for us.” Once the two scout planes were recovered, he turned Task Force 16 back east toward the fuel rendezvous.39

  * Before the Hiryū went down, the roughly forty Japanese survivors still on board her (though not Yamaguchi or Captain Kaku) successfully evacuated in a cutter stocked with supplies. They spent the next two weeks hoping to be rescued by their countrymen. Instead they were spotted by a PBY out of Midway and picked up by the U.S. submarine tender USS Ballard on June 19. Not until then did Spruance learn for certain that the Hiryū had sunk.

  * For Ring himself it was another day of hair-pulling frustration. As he dove at last on an enemy warship, he discovered to his horror that his bomb would not release. Frantically, he continued to press the release butt on, to no avail, and in the end he had to return to the Hornet with his bomb still att ached. Afterward, a rumor circulated within Ruff Johnson’s squadron that Ring did not know how to drop a bomb. While perhaps unfair, it suggested how alienated Ring had become from the pilots he commanded. That night in his quarters, Ring asked Ensign Clayton Fisher to demonstrate to him how to use the emergency bomb release lever in case it ever happened again.

  * Just over two years later, during the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June of 1944, Marc Mitscher, by then commanding the American fast carrier task force of fifteen carriers and seven fast battleships, ordered the carriers to turn on their lights to assist pilots returning from a long-range strike. Almost certainly, his inspiration for that decision was Spruance’s action during the Battle of Midway.

  * Neilson’s comparison was spot on. The Portland-class Indianapolis displaced 12,000 tons and carried nine 8-inch guns. The Mogami-class cruisers displaced 11,200 tons and carried ten 8-inch guns.

  EPILOGUE

  “The efforts and sacrifices of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps forces involved in the Battle of Midway have been crowned with glorious success and I firmly believe have already changed the course of the war.”

  —Admiral Chester Nimitz

  June 7 was a Sunday morning, and it dawned on a changed world. It was six months to the day after that other Sunday morning when the Japanese had surprised the world by attacking the American battle fleet in Pearl Harbor. Now the instrument of that attack had been smashed beyond recovery. Japan still had the Shokaku and Zuikaku, as well as a number of smaller carriers, plus her large battleship and cruiser fleet, but the concentrated Kidō Butai that had dominated the Pacific for half a year was no more. The only prize the Japanese had won for their massive effort and astounding losses was the occupation of the tiny islands of Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian archipelago, and, as Commander Miyo had prophesied back in April, those outposts proved more of a burden than a benefit. The living conditions were horrible. The Japanese occupiers spent most of their time huddled in poorly insulated barracks trying not to freeze to death. Rear Admiral Theobald could not figure out why they wanted the islands in the first place, or why they stayed there. “There is no manner in which a force could be made self-sufficient in this area,” he wrote. “Food, ammunition, and military supplies … have to flow to the Japanese forces in a steady stream and in considerable volume.” It just made no sense. He wondered whether the Japanese wanted to fish the surrounding waters. More likely they remained simply because it was all they had to show for the loss of five capital ships,1 hundreds of combat airplanes, and thousands of men.2

  The full extent of the American victory at Midway became evident only gradually. In a cable to Stalin, Roosevelt described the outcome of the battle as “indecisive” as late as June 6. Nimitz, Fletcher, and Spruance did not learn that all four of the Japanese carriers had gone down until the seaplane tender Ballard rescued the last of the Hiryūs survivors from their small cutter on June 19. In fact, the Battle of Midway was the most complete naval victory since Horatio Nelson’s near annihilation of the Spanish and French fleets at Trafalgar in 1805, and, like that battle, it had momentous strategic consequences. The previous April, the Japanese had been in a position to choose from among half a dozen strategic options. Now those options had narrowed to one: a perimeter defense designed to wear out the Americans and force them to the negotiating table. The war had three more years to run, but the Japanese never again seized the strategic initiative; their only hope was to hold out long enough for the Americans to tire of the struggle.3

  The battle had the opposite effect on the Americans. They had suffered too, of course. The loss of the Yorktown on June 7 was a severe blow. Nonetheless, the return that same day of the repaired Saratoga gave Nimitz three carriers—soon to be four, since the Wasp was at that moment on her way to the Pacific. With four carrier task groups, Nimitz and the Americans had operational superiority over their foe for the first time in the war, and that encouraged Ernie King to renew his push for an early offensive against the Japanese. He wrote to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, insisting, “It is urgent, in my opinion, that we lose no time in taking the initiative.” Once it became evident that there would be no cross-channel invasion of occupied France in 1942, King pushed even harder for a Pacific offensive that would begin no later than August 1 “or shortly the
reafter.”4

  MacArthur, too, saw the victory at Midway as opening the door for an offensive. He insisted that it “should be exploited at the earliest possible date.” Given Roosevelt’s commitment to the Germany First concept, a complete reorientation of the war to the Pacific was unlikely. The president made it clear that he was “opposed to an American all-out effort in the Pacific.” MacArthur nonetheless sought 40,000 soldiers to begin an offensive against Rabaul and appealed to Marshall for support. Marshall was more receptive to such an appeal than he might have been a month earlier, for he was disappointed—even angered—by British unwillingness to accept the American proposal for a cross-channel invasion of occupied France in 1942.5

  King was as eager as anyone to obtain more resources for an offensive in the Pacific, but he was adamant that the Navy and not the Army should have direction of what he conceived of as a naval war. Instead of advancing directly to Rabaul from Australia, as MacArthur envisioned, King proposed approaching the Japanese citadel along the axis of the Solomon Islands, beginning with landings on Tulagi and Guadalcanal, where the Japanese were building an airstrip. Moreover, he insisted that such amphibious operations were the provenance of the Navy and Marine Corps. “In my opinion,” he wrote to Marshall, “this part of the operation must be conducted under the direction of the Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet [Nimitz], and cannot be conducted in any other way.” In a kind of preemptive strike, on June 25 he ordered Nimitz to assemble the forces needed “for commencing offensive operations about one August.”6

  King’s move forced Marshall to choose between MacArthur and the Navy. Marshall had great respect for MacArthur, who had been Army Chief of Staff back when Marshall was a mere colonel. King, on the other hand, was a powerful advocate of the argument that since the Army had control of the European theater, the Navy should have oversight in the Pacific. In a kind of compromise, Marshall agreed to move the theater boundary between Nimitz’s and MacArthur’s commands one degree (sixty miles) to the west in order to put Guadalcanal within Nimitz’s theater. As a result of that decision, on August 7, just two months after the Battle of Midway, ten thousand U.S. Marines went ashore on Guadalcanal to seize the airfield (which they named for Major Lofton Henderson, the martyred VMSB-241 commander at Midway) and to inaugurate what turned into a savage fourteen-month campaign of attrition.

  During those fourteen months, American soldiers and Marines fought their way westward from Guadalcanal to other places with exotic names: Rendova, Kolombangara, Vella Lavella, and Bougainville. The Japanese fought ferociously, but they lost more than they could afford in a futile defense of these sparsely populated jungle outposts. In their prewar plan, their defense of the empire’s perimeter was supposed to diminish the American battle fleet as it moved westward. Like a wave running up a sloping beach, the Americans would lose power and momentum as they advanced. Instead, the longer the campaign lasted, the stronger American forces became.

  In May 1943, the new-construction carrier USS Essex (CV-9) joined the Pacific fleet, the first of an eventual twenty-four ships of her class. The foolishness of the Japanese decision to launch a war against an industrial juggernaut like the United States was thus fully revealed. The second Essex-class carrier had been prospectively named the Bonhomme Richard in honor of John Paul Jones’s flagship during the American Revolution, but after Midway she was rechristened Yorktown (CV-10). The existence of two carriers both named Yorktown still causes confusion for some students of the Second World War, but there is something symbolic about it. Three times the Japanese believed that they had sunk the Yorktown: once in the Coral Sea and twice at Midway. Even after she finally succumbed, she reemerged again only months later in a newer and bigger form. To the Japanese, the Americans must have seemed like the mythical Hydra, which grew two new heads whenever one was decapitated.

  For their part, the Japanese never recovered from the loss of the four big fleet carriers sunk at Midway. They simply did not have the industrial capacity to produce a score of new carriers in the midst of war. Even more critically, Japan never recovered from the loss of so many of her airplanes and trained carrier pilots. The battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, and especially the grinding Solomons campaign claimed hundreds of frontline aircraft and the lives of a disproportionate number of her frontline pilots. Genda Minoru later observed despondently, “One after another, our best pilots were lost, and green, inexperienced men came in as replacements.” The Japanese had no option but to rely on these young and untested pilots who, however earnest and determined, lacked the training, and especially the experience, of their predecessors.7

  By the time the Solomons campaign came to an end in the fall of 1943, the United States boasted seven new Essex-class aircraft carriers whose hanger decks were packed with a thousand new planes from American factories, and which were manned by thousands of new pilots who streamed out of American training programs. In November of 1943, the United States began an island-hopping campaign that led them to the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Marianas, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and finally to the very doorstep of Japan’s home islands. The Japanese continued to fight courageously, and they inflicted heavy casualties, but they never succeeded in halting the American advance. In hindsight, it is evident that the course of the war—and with it the course of history—had tilted on the fulcrum of the Battle of Midway.

  Chester Nimitz remained as CinCPac for the duration of the war and directed the Pacific campaign right up to the signing of the instrument of surrender on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. In December of 1944, President Roosevelt promoted him to the newly established rank of five-star fleet admiral, and he remains one of only nine men ever to hold that rank. At war’s end, he relieved King as chief of naval operations and retired from the Navy two years later. He died at his quarters on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco Bay in February 1966.

  Frank Jack Fletcher never received the credit he deserved for the victory at Midway; some accounts of the battle even imply that it was Spruance and not Fletcher who commanded the American carrier forces in the battle. For the most part this was the result of subsequent events. Two months after Midway, Fletcher commanded the fleet protecting the Guadalcanal landing force. He initially expected to keep a three-carrier task force there for three days, but because the landings were proceeding well, he recommended that the carriers be withdrawn after two days in order to limit their exposure in the confined waters around the Solomon Islands. That provoked angry criticism from the American amphibious commander, Richmond Kelly Turner, and reignited questions in the mind of Ernie King about Fletcher’s determination. Later that month, after his flagship, Saratoga, was torpedoed by a Japanese sub, Fletcher brought her back to Pearl Harbor for repairs and Nimitz sent Fletcher Stateside for two weeks’ recuperation. Afterward, rather than return him to the front, King sent Fletcher to command the Thirteenth Naval District at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Washington State. It was the end of Fletcher’s sea service. After the war, Fletcher headed the Navy’s General Board, a largely ceremonial post. He retired from the Navy as a four-star admiral in 1947 and died at his farm in southern Maryland in 1973 at the age of 87.

  Raymond Spruance became Nimitz’s chief of staff after the Battle of Midway. Over the next thirteen months, he worked closely with his boss, living with him under the same roof and walking to work with him every day. In the process he learned the nuances of theater command. Nimitz came to admire Spruance’s quiet work ethic, which closely resembled his own. In the fall of 1943, as the United States geared up for the islandhopping campaign that would take it to the shores of Japan, Nimitz tapped Spruance for command of the Fifth Fleet, essentially the offensive arm of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific. In that capacity, Spruance directed operations against Tarawa in the Gilberts, Kwajalein in the Marshalls, and Saipan in the Marianas. When Nimitz became CNO in 1945, Spruance took over as CinCPac. After the war, he served as president of the Naval War College from 1946 until he retired in 1948. He died in 1969 at his ho
me in Pebble Beach, California, at age 83.

  William Halsey recovered from his skin condition and returned to active duty in September of 1942, replacing the disappointing Robert L. Ghormley in command of the South Pacific. After that, Halsey and his former subordinate Raymond Spruance took turns commanding the “Big Blue Fleet,” which was called Third Fleet when Halsey commanded it and Fifth Fleet when Spruance did so. Halsey never lost his pugnacious edge, though it got him into trouble at least twice: once during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October of 1944, when he charged off after an enemy carrier fleet, leaving a critical strait unguarded, and once when he failed to take adequate precautions against a powerful typhoon in December 1944. That latter incident resulted in the deaths of eight hundred men and the loss of 146 airplanes. After a subsequent encounter with another typhoon, a board of inquiry recommended that Halsey be reassigned, but Nimitz intervened on his behalf. In December 1945, Halsey joined Nimitz as a five-star fleet admiral and retired two years later in 1947. He died in 1959 at the age of 86.

  Marc “Pete” Mitscher was never officially called to account for his error-plagued performance at Midway. Spruance knew that Mitscher’s report was flawed, however, and he very likely suggested to Nimitz that Mitscher should no longer command a carrier task force. After the battle, Nimitz transferred Mitscher to the command of Patrol Wing Two, a shore-based billet, and Mitscher remained there in a kind of exile until December. In April 1943 he became commander of air assets in the Solomons and gradually worked his way back into Nimitz’s good graces. In January of 1944 he received command of the Fast Carrier Task Force, called Task Force 58 since it was associated with Spruance’s Fifth Fleet. Based on his success in that role, he was promosted to vice admiral in March. With overwhelming superiority over the enemy, Mitscher emerged as “the Bald Eagle” and “the Magnificent Mitscher,” winning several decorations. After the war, he became the deputy CNO for Air, and then, as a four-star admiral, commander of the Atlantic Fleet. Mitscher’s health was never good; he died in February 1947 at the age of 60 while still on active duty.