Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  As the deadly Zeros returned periodically to the carriers to refuel and rearm during the morning turkey shoot, an observer on the Akagi noted that the “service crews cheered the returning pilots, patted them on the shoulder, and shouted words of encouragement. As soon as a plane was ready again the pilot nodded, pushed forward the throttle, and roared back into the sky. This scene was repeated time and again as the desperate air struggle continued” (M. Fuchida and M. Okimiya, Midway, the Battle That Doomed Japan, 176). American pilots would find little chance of recovery even if they survived being shot down by these Zeros; most who climbed out of their sinking bombers were strafed in the water. The two naval pilots known to be taken prisoner at Midway were interrogated, then shortly afterward bound, weighted, and thrown overboard. Standard orders for Japanese patrolling ships were to question prisoners to learn of the enemy’s situation and then “dispose of them suitably.”

  General morale on the Japanese carriers was sky-high and bordered on arrogance. And why not? As of yet the fleet had not suffered a real defeat and had nothing but contempt for the fighting potential of American sailors, infantrymen, and pilots. From the outbreak of the war on December 7, 1941, the Japanese carrier forces alone had sunk or disabled eight battleships and two cruisers (Pearl Harbor, December 7) and bombed and sunk the British battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales (off Kuantan, December 10), the cruisers Houston and Marblehead (north of Java, February 4, 1942), the British cruisers Exeter, Cornwall, and Dorsetshire (February 27 off Tjilatjap and April 5 near Colombo). They sent to the bottom or severely damaged three allied aircraft carriers (HMS Hermes near Trincomalee on April 9 and the Lexington and Yorktown [damaged] at the battle of Coral Sea, May 8)—all at a cost of a few destroyers and a single light aircraft carrier. For the preparations for Midway, the United States had one battleship and only three carriers in its entire Pacific fleet. The Americans had not yet sunk a single Japanese capital ship. Former pilot Masatake Okumiya and aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi summed up this remarkable record of Japanese naval-air victories in the first half-year of the war:

  The tally of enemy and Japanese ships lost in the first six months of the war was a literal realization of the Navy’s concept of “ideal combat conditions,” to “wage a decisive sea battle only under air control.” For the ten years prior to the Pacific War we had trained our airmen implicitly to believe that sea battles fought under our command of the air could result only in our victories. The initial phases of the Pacific War dramatically upheld this belief. (M. Okumiya and J. Horikoshi, Zero! , 153)

  This confidence often accounted for the gratuitous cruelty shown toward captured soldiers, who were considered cowardly for surrendering. During the earlier Wake Island campaign immediately following Pearl Harbor, Japanese sailors had brutalized captured American marines and routinely clubbed them before shipping them off to camps in Japan and China. At least five Americans were ceremoniously beheaded on one transport’s deck, then their bodies mutilated to cheers from Japanese sailors before being dumped overboard. From the beginning of the Pacific War there was a savagery—arising partly from innate racial animosity, partly out of the perversion of the ancient Bushido code of military protocol by Japanese militarists in the 1930s, partly from pent-up anger over the long European colonial presence in Asia—in the Japanese approach to battle that would soon draw retaliation from the Anglo-American forces. That mutual hatred explains much of the tension and spirit of the combatants at Midway.

  Almost as a general rule, Japanese soldiers, well after the killing on the battlefield had ceased, would go on to butcher and torture surrendering and unarmed captives—in China, the Philippines, and the Pacific—with far more frequency than either the British or the Americans. The Allies had nothing comparable to Japanese concentration camps, where macabre medical experiments and routine shootings were not unusual. True, the Americans would eventually engage in brutality on a far greater scale, as the firebombing of the Japanese cities and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki attest. But in American eyes—and this was entirely characteristic of the Western way of war that had originated on the daylight killing fields of ancient Greece and evolved into the Roman, medieval, and Christian concept of a just war (ius in bello)—its indiscriminate carpet bombing was far different from murdering prisoners.

  The Allies killed on a massive scale, but almost exclusively through open and direct assault, with veritable notification of intent, often in reprisal, and under hostile fire—not customarily in camps or after the firing had stopped. Japanese antiaircraft and fighters attempted to shoot down parachuting bombing crews, who were usually executed upon forced landing in enemy territory. To Americans, the Japanese were “free” in open combat to prevent bomber attacks on their urban and industrial sites. They knew the American planes were coming, and they should expect retaliation for starting the war and waging it in China and the Pacific in a most beastly and cruel manner. The Americans further reasoned that as long as they were killing during the actual exchange of gunfire, and doing so as part of an effort to wreck the military-industrial base of imperial Japan, all was more or less fair in pitched battle. In contrast, the Japanese simply counted the dead, and figured that hundreds of thousands more of their own innocent civilians had died from American bombs than American captives tortured and executed by their camp interrogators and guards.

  This dichotomy was true enough of all East-West engagements in the history of warfare: Westerners decried summary executions and torture of their captured defenseless combatants, while their own far better-armed and -equipped forces openly and “fairly” butchered thousands during the fighting. Non-Westerners saw such machine-gunning, artillery barrages, and carpet bombing against their own relatively ill equipped soldiers and even more vulnerable civilians as barbaric—even as they often mutilated and executed prisoners of war. In that sense, for example, Hernán Cortés and Lord Chelmsford were outraged when Aztecs and Zulus tortured and killed captives, but themselves thought nothing of riding down and spearing from the rear thousands of poorly protected Native Americans and Zulus in the heat of battle. The British were horrified over the beheading and desecration of their dead at Isandhlwana, but assumed that the machine-gunning of hundreds of spear-carrying Zulu warriors at the battle of Ulundi was fair play. To the Americans, firebombing and the incineration of nearly 200,000 Japanese soldiers, workers, and civilians in a single week over Tokyo during March 1945, while sending Japanese captives to relatively humane prisoner-of-war camps in the American heartland, made perfect military sense; to the Japanese, the murder of downed B-29 pilots, often by summary beheading, was small recompense for the cremation of hundreds of thousands of their kin.

  At about the same time that Waldron’s Torpedo 8 was being annihilated in its doomed attack on the Soryu, another group of Devastators— Lieutenant Commander Eugene E. Lindsey’s fourteen torpedo planes from Torpedo 6 of the carrier Enterprise—flew over the Akagi and headed for the Kaga. Although the Enterprise’s torpedo planes had more experience than Waldron’s Devastators—some had fought during the recent Marshall and Wake Islands campaigns—like the Hornet planes, Lindsey’s TBDs came in without fighter escort and unaided by dive-bombers, which were still high in the clouds. The original miscalculations in finding the Japanese fleet, the cloud cover, and great variance in altitudes between torpedo bombers, fighters, and dive-bombers meant that this batch of Devastators also lost contact early on with the other Enterprise fighter escorts. The latter never did find its carrier’s torpedo or dive-bombers and returned to their carrier without firing a shot.

  This complete absence of supporting aircraft ensured that the slaughter of Torpedo 6 was inevitable. But the ease with which the Japanese brought down this second wave of torpedo planes gave a false sense of security to the naval gunners of the imperial fleet—some officers felt that they could shoot down the entire American naval force itself, without even attacking their home carriers by air. Air Commander Genda on the Akagi righ
tly likened the Devastators to tired mules. After a few hours of knocking down the land-based bombers and the carrier torpedo planes, the crewmen of the imperial fleet found the Americans surprisingly brave, but amateurish and inexperienced, with antiquated planes and substandard torpedoes. Their assessment was generally right on nearly all counts.

  Twenty-five Zeros from the targeted carriers screeched down from their high-flying air patrol to blast apart Torpedo 6, miles from the Japanese fleet. For fifteen minutes antiaircraft and fighters shredded the lumbering Devastators, which split off to form an attack from both sides of the Kaga. Lindsey’s plane was one of the first to be hit and quickly incinerated. Finally, at 9:58 A.M., almost two hours after they had taken off from the Enterprise, four surviving TBDs got close enough to launch their torpedoes at the Kaga. None found their mark. These were the only planes of the fourteen of this second attack to return. Another twenty crewmen from the Americans’ torpedo planes had disappeared into the sea. The slaughter of the TBDs continued.

  Three American carriers were launching air squadrons against the Japanese fleet at Midway at about 8:00 A.M. on June 4, and now the final torpedo plane attack—Lem Massey’s twelve Devastators from Torpedo 3 of the Yorktown—reached the Soryu just about the time the Hornet and Enterprise TBDs were falling into the sea. Like the other fated torpedo planes, Massey’s came in without fighter escort, drawing the full attention of the Japanese antiaircraft and aerial defense. Only five TBDs even got close enough to launch torpedoes against the Hiryu. Three of these were shot down far short of the target. From six to ten Zeros followed the remnants of Torpedo 3 all the way to the carrier, forcing the plodding American planes down to little more than 150 feet above the sea.

  Massey, like Waldron and Lindsey earlier, did not survive the morning. Neither skill nor courage meant anything when piloting an obsolete Devastator. The few crewmen of Torpedo 3 who made it back reported that Massey was one of the first to be hit and was last seen standing on the wing of his plane, after crawling out of a flaming cockpit. The Yorktown’s tiny and outmanned fighter escort under Jimmy Thatch was valiantly fighting off still more Zeros miles above Massey and could offer no help to his Torpedo 3. Again, through an unfortunate mixture of bad luck, general incompetence, and faulty staff procedure, the entire dive-bombing and fighter arm of the third American carrier, Hornet, played absolutely no role in the initial attacks on the Japanese fleet. All of Hornet’s Wildcats and Dauntlesses either turned back to the carrier, made emergency landings at Midway itself, or crashed into the sea out of fuel. Only Waldron’s torpedo planes found the enemy, and without exception they were shot down.

  By the time the Japanese had beaten off the third American torpedo attack, the protective cover of the fleet’s Zeros was in disarray and near sea level, not at the required height far above the fleet, in formation scouting for dive-bombers. Many Japanese fighters after the morning shooting were landing to refuel and rearm, and the entire attention of the fleet’s antiaircraft arsenal was focused on blasting away at sea level the last of the doomed torpedo planes. Miraculously, at nearly the exact time as the third and final TBD attack was repulsed, dozens of the high-flying Dauntless bombers from the Enterprise and Yorktown finally arrived as if on cue. The first 102 American carrier planes had either been shot down or become lost, but there were still 50 dive-bombers left—less than a third of the original force—to begin the attack. Now to their utter amazement they dived untouched from 15,000 feet to ignite the Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu.

  To the modern American at the millennium, these carrier pilots of more than a half century ago—Massey, Waldron, and Lindsey last seen fighting to free themselves in a sea of flames as their planes were blasted apart by Zeros—now appear as superhuman exemplars of what constituted heroism in the bleak months after World War II. Even their names seem almost caricatures of an earlier stalwart American manhood—Max Leslie, Lem Massey, Wade McClusky, Jack Waldron—doomed fighters who were not all young eighteen-year-old conscripts, but often married and with children, enthusiastic rather than merely willing to fly their decrepit planes into a fiery end above the Japanese fleet, in a few seconds to orphan their families if need be to defend all that they held dear. One wonders if an America of suburban, video-playing Nicoles, Ashleys, and Jasons shall ever see their like again.

  THE IMPERIAL FLEET MOVES OUT

  Midway was one of the largest sea battles of World War II and, like the battle of Leyte Gulf two years later, one of the most complex and decisive engagements in the history of naval warfare. Fought over three days across the international date line, it involved a theater more than 1,000 miles wide. The battle saw Japanese carrier attacks against Midway, carrier-to-carrier torpedo and dive-bombing, aerial dogfights between Zeros and both land- and carrier-based American fighters, submarine torpedoing and destroyer counter-depth-charging, sorties by American army high-altitude and marine dive and torpedo bombers based on Midway, and futile efforts by Japanese battleships and heavy cruisers to engage the American carriers and cruisers in naval gunfire. Men above, on, and under the vast Pacific the first week of June 1942 were fervently trying to blow each other up.

  Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of the successful Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, assembled for the Midway-Aleutian offensive nearly two hundred warships—carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and troop carriers—whose combined displacement exceeded 1.5 million tons, manned by more than 100,000 sailors and pilots, and commanded by 20 admirals. Eighty-six of the ships would be engaged in the Midway theater alone. The scale of the clash with the American fleet would thus approximate the enormous numbers of combatants present at the gargantuan East-West sea battles of the past at Salamis (150,000 to 250,000) or Lepanto (180,000 to 200,000). The Japanese fleet that steamed out to Midway was the largest and most powerful flotilla in the history of naval warfare—until the Americans themselves collected an even larger and more deadly armada a little over two years later at the battle of Leyte Gulf.

  The fliers on the carriers Akagi, Kagi, Hiryu, and Soryu were among Japan’s best airmen and had far more years of experience than their green counterparts in the American fleet. The entire armada boasted a potential air arm of nearly seven hundred naval and land-based planes on carriers and transports, and more than three hundred near Midway alone. So confident were the Japanese of victory at Midway—“the sentry of Hawaii”— that they envisioned the campaign as a prelude to even more vast operations that would ideally send their undefeated carrier forces against New Caledonia and Fiji in early July 1942, then later that month on to bomb Sydney and Allied bases in southern Australia, before assembling the entire fleet for a knockout blow against Hawaii in early August.

  By early fall 1942 Yamamoto’s dream of a lightning-fast offensive against the bewildered and unprepared Americans would be complete with the occupation of Midway. After the loss of all its Pacific bases, supply lines to Australia cut, and the Pacific fleet sunk, the United States would surely ask for a negotiated peace—one that ratified Japanese control of Asia and demarcated in the Pacific clear limits to American influence. The April 18 surprise bombing attack on Tokyo by carrier-based B-25 medium bombers had only convinced the Japanese high command to hasten its summer final plans to rid the Pacific of the American nuisance.

  Scholars have often faulted the various components of Yamamoto’s plan, which would prove to be overly sophisticated, poorly coordinated, and possessed of too many aims: the conquest of Midway, occupation of some of the western Aleutian islands, and destruction of the American carrier fleet were difficult to obtain in unison and at times even antithetical objectives. The Japanese fleet was therefore fragmented into a series of disconnected striking forces—five at least with their own various subgroups—that were so dispersed and often without communication that the Japanese were never able to focus their vast numerical superiority at any one place.

  Ideally, Yamamoto’s ships would inaugurate hostilities by dispatching more than fif
teen submarines east of Midway to detect the early approach of the American fleet from either Hawaii or the West Coast. The submarines could fuel marine search planes, as well as send advance notice to the main fleet concerning the size and number of the approaching enemy before torpedoing the capital ships in transit. But because of superb American intelligence concerning the entire Japanese mode of attack, nearly all the submarines arrived too late. They gave Yamamoto no information about the Americans’ progress. For most of the early battle they lagged far behind most of the U.S. fleet, without a clue that the Americans were in fact already off Midway and waiting for the Japanese carriers.

  Next, a northern force under Vice Admiral Moshiro Hosogaya would lead two light carriers, six heavy and light cruisers, twelve destroyers, six submarines, and other assorted ships, along with 2,500 troops to occupy the Aleutians—an assault that would turn out tactically successful, but without any strategic advantage to the Japanese. Whereas the occupation of Midway could lead to attacks on Hawaii and the headquarters of the American fleet, no one in the Japanese admiralty could ever explain the long-term significance of occupying one or two frigid islands in the Bering Sea, the site of few American troops and no industry—and far from both Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States.