Against Midway itself, the Japanese would send Admiral Nagumo’s 1st Carrier Striking Force, with the Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu, supported by subgroups of two battleships, three cruisers, and eleven destroyers. After the carriers’ planes softened up the island through repeated bombing sorties, Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka would arrive with twelve transports and three destroyer transports carrying 5,000 troops to occupy Midway. If the occupation force needed cover, or should the American fleet take the bait and attempt to contest the invasion, Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita would then provide further firepower for the assault with four heavy cruisers and two destroyers—to be joined with Admiral Kondo’s even larger force of two battleships, four heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, eight destroyers, and a light carrier. The Japanese envisioned a late-arriving, crippled, and naïve American navy, desperate to attack a succession of decoy ships, to be pounced on in turn by ever larger and more deadly imperial carriers and battleships in waiting.
Rear Admiral Ruitaro Fujita would follow up with two seaplane carriers and two small ships to occupy nearby tiny Kure Island, in hopes of establishing a land-based air force to aid in reconnaissance over Midway and attacks on the American fleet. In a surface engagement the Americans had nothing comparable to match the Japanese heavy guns, and should the carriers lose their protective air screen or find themselves too near the quick Japanese fleet, there was nothing in their arsenal to prevent the battleships from blasting the American ships out of the sea.
The heart of the Japanese armada was elsewhere. Four battleships, two light cruisers, and twelve destroyers were far to the north of Midway under Vice Admiral Takasu, in conjunction with Admiral Yamamoto’s main force of three battleships—including the monstrous 64,000-ton Yamato, whose 18.1-inch guns could throw enormous shells over twentyfive miles—a light cruiser, nine destroyers, and three light carriers. This northern force would cover the flanks of the Aleutian assaults, and in theory be positioned to return southwest to Midway should the Americans contest the invasion there. In Yamamoto’s thinking he had created an iron chain of interlocking naval forces, spanning a thousand-mile gap from the Aleutians to Midway, which would bar all westward movement to the Americans, ensuring that there would never again be an American bombing attack on the Japanese mainland. For all its complexity, there was a certain simple logic to the Japanese plan: by blockading the northern Pacific between the Aleutians and Midway itself, Yamamoto guaranteed that either his northern or his southern forces would flush out the vastly outnumbered and bewildered Americans. The latter would either have to fight or see their islands both north and south lost. How odd that the sacrifice of fewer than a hundred green American torpedo pilots would ruin all of Yamamoto’s elaborate ideas of annihilating the American Pacific fleet.
The vast distance between the two groups also meant that the numerically inferior Americans could not simultaneously protect both. Yamamoto’s battleships and the carriers would act as a sort of roving reserve that would rush to the point of American counterattack, while the Aleutian and Midway assault forces and accompanying battleship and cruiser fleets completed their invasions. It was unlikely that the timid Americans would show up until the Aleutians and Midway were occupied—and then they would be met by land-based bombers from those newly acquired bases and naval planes freed from protecting vulnerable troop transports. Since the Japanese fleet was hitherto undefeated and qualitatively superior, it should not require its combined strength anyway to blast away a weak and inexperienced American challenge.
The only ostensible problem for the Japanese was that they assumed the vastly outnumbered Americans would be complacent and surprised, rather than tipped-off and waiting. Admiral Nagumo’s intelligence report concluded on the eve of the battle: “Although the enemy lacks the will to fight, it is likely that he will counterattack if our occupation operations progress satisfactorily.” Yamamoto apparently could not conceive that the previously beaten Americans might anticipate the landings at Midway— much less that they might arrive there first with three carriers to concentrate on the Japanese carrier force under Nagumo. But the Americans had radar on their ships and on Midway itself, which in effect would serve as an unsinkable aircraft carrier.
In the American scenario of a carrier war deliberately waged in close proximity to Midway, the match was about even—four Japanese to the American three flattops, the latter aided by auxiliary air support from the island. In Napoleonic fashion Admiral Chester Nimitz would deal with segments of Yamamoto’s chain, destroying links in isolation until the odds were more even: first sink the carriers, the heart of the Japanese fleet, then prevent the more strategically important Midway landings, and finally turn to an airborne assault on Yamamoto’s battleships and cruisers if need be.
Just assembling the colossal fleet had meant that the Japanese ships left ports 1,800 miles apart, and even when arriving at their destinations some ships would remain a thousand miles distant. If radio silence were to be maintained, there was little likelihood that all the components of the armada could preserve communications—critical, when a key element of the cumbersome plan was to draw out the American outnumbered fleet, to be swarmed on cue by superior forces converging from the north and south.
To oppose these forces, the Americans could scarcely scrape up three carriers—including the heavily damaged Yorktown, which had just limped in nearly wrecked from the battle of Coral Sea. A tiny contingent under Rear Admiral Robert Theobald was sent to the Aleutians with two heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, and ten destroyers, but was poorly deployed and played no role in preventing the Japanese from landing or attacking enemy ships. There were no American battleships in Hawaii to deploy to Midway. Instead, Admiral Nimitz hastily gathered what he had—a mere eight cruisers and fifteen destroyers. Nineteen submarines were patrolling from Midway to Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese plan was unwieldy but not in itself doomed to failure, given the imperial fleet’s vast numerical superiority in every category of ship and its far more experienced crews. But as we shall see, at critical stages during the planning, fighting, and aftermath of the battle, American military personnel at all ranks were unusually innovative, even eccentric, and always unpredictable. Most were unafraid to take the initiative to craft policy when orders from superiors were either vague or nonexistent—in a fashion completely antithetical to the protocols of operations in the imperial fleet, which in turn mirrored much of the prevailing values and attitudes inherent in Japanese society. The result was that Americans improvised when plans went awry, resorted to new and innovative methods of attack when orthodoxy was unproductive—not unlike the Christians’ sawing off their galley prows at Lepanto to increase cannon accuracy or Cortés sending his men into a volcano to replenish their stores of gunpowder.
WESTERN AND NON-WESTERN JAPAN
At Midway the Americans enjoyed a technological edge only in radar and communications. Their frontline carrier planes—Wildcat fighters, Devastator torpedo planes, and Dauntless dive-bombers—were uniformly inferior to Japanese models, which possessed superior speed, maneuverability, and more reliable ordnance. By 1942 Japanese torpedoes were the best in the world, American arguably the worst. The Zero fighter—light, fast, and easy to construct—was a product of engineering genius. There was nothing like it in the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1941. The four Japanese carriers themselves were every bit as modern as British and American models. Japan had built battleships that were the largest on the seas: the Yamato and soon-to-be-launched Musashi, whose gross tonnages and armaments were far superior to any surface ship in either the British or the American navy at the outbreak of the war.
Clearly, the American victory at Midway was not due—as alleged by some postbellum Japanese observers—to the superiority of Western technology. Indeed, for well over half a century Japan had adopted many of the tenets of European military organization and methods of armament, as part of a massive revolution in Japanese society to embrace Western science and industrial production. By the beg
inning of the twentieth century, a state with few natural resources had become a veritable world power largely through its embrace of the Western way of warfare. Japanese ships at Midway were the embodiment of Western, not Asian, military science.
Japan had never been colonized or conquered by Westerners until 1945. Its distance from Europe, proximity to an isolationist and inward-looking nineteenth-century America, absence of inviting land and plentiful resources, and enormous hungry population made it unattractive to would-be Western conquistadors. Yet in its initial, belated encounters with the West, nineteenth-century Japan had consciously decided to emulate and improve on, rather than reject, Western methods of industrial production and technological research. Whereas the airplane was invented in America, the self-propelled ironclad battleship and aircraft carrier in Britain and America, and the entire notion of a seagoing, oil-burning navy entirely a European development, the Japanese by 1941 had matched, and in some cases outpaced, both the British and the Americans in naval and aerial designs. Unlike other Asian countries—China especially stands out—Japan in the latter nineteenth century had gradually begun to ignore its innate cultural inhibitions to adapting wholesale Western ideas of capitalism, industrial development, and military operations. Even its cultural conservatives conceded that Western barbarians and devils could never be resisted simply by superior courage and samurai vigor. Japan’s survival would be found through the adoption of European weapons and methods of mass production—with Japanese ingenuity at each step of the way ready to improve where warranted.
After the first contact in the mid-sixteenth century with the Portuguese, from whom they learned to fabricate firearms, the Japanese within a few decades were equipping entire armies with improved cannon and muskets—and in the process threatened the samurai hierarchy, whose martial capital hinged on a spiritual, antitechnological, xenophobic, and antimodern foundation. In reaction to such new technology, feudal lords gradually disarmed the population and prevented the further importation of arms as part of a general ban against all foreign influence. The result was that by the early seventeenth century nearly all trade outside of Japan was outlawed. Oceangoing vessels were prohibited. Christianity was made illegal and most foreigners deported. By 1635 Japan was once again closed off from any contact whatsoever with “big-nosed, smelly” barbarians, a situation that was to remain static until Admiral Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 with an armada of formidable American warships. By then Japanese technological progress had all but stagnated, and there remained only a few antiquated gunpowder weapons in the entire national arsenal with which to oppose the Americans.
Perry’s cannon and explosive shells, his steam-powered fleet, and his rifle-carrying marines convinced the Japanese to admit foreign ships. By 1854 when Perry returned to Japan from China, the Japanese formally signed treaties allowing American ships access to their waters and free sailing in the surrounding seas. Several European nations followed suit and began trading with Japan and interfering throughout the entire Asian subcontinent. But from such humiliation came radical change. In contrast to Eastern resentment in China and Southeast Asia, the Japanese reaction against foreign encroachment was to get even rather than merely angry, as they recognized the folly of an imperial power’s rejection of Western science. After a few futile efforts at resistance, Japanese culture in a sweeping and unprecedented revolution, in both the ideological and the material sense, began to adopt Western manufacturing and banking practices at full scale.
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the power of the Japanese warlords was at an end. In 1877 in Satsuma a last-ditch uprising of samurai warriors, armed with traditional swords and matchlock muskets, was soundly defeated by a conscripted army, outfitted and drilled in the European style, proving to the Japanese that the Western way of war trumped class, tradition, and national heritage and was insidiously effective in its allegiance solely to battlefield utility. The samurai clans were now mere curiosities, and the population united behind an emperor and the new effort to emulate the modern European nation-state:
Orders for rifles and cannon went to France. . . . When Germany defeated France in 1871, the Japanese quickly switched to the victors. Soon Japanese soldiers were goose-stepping and following Prussian infantry tactics. Japanese naval officers, most of whom were samurai from the once rebellious Satsuma clan, learned from the British Royal Navy, often after years at sea aboard British ships. Japan’s new ships would be built in England, too, for Britain ruled the sea and the Japanese wished to learn from the best. Japan’s Westernization was not confined to military matters. Western arts, literature, science, music, and fashion also flourished. University students feasted on anything Western . . . as samurai became industrialists, railroad magnates, and bankers. (R. Edgerton, Warriors of the Rising Sun, 44)
The result was that by 1894 the Japanese had driven China out of Korea—thanks to a completely Westernized military that was better organized and armed than any force in Asia. Whereas the Chinese had only haphazardly imported European guns and ships, and then generally resisted the infrastructure necessary to fabricate their own modern arms industry, the Japanese army and navy were employing the fruits of Japan’s own nascent but burgeoning arms production and adopting the latest European tactical doctrine, with their own innovative efforts such as night attacks and mass assaults at perceived weak points.
During the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, Japanese expeditionary forces proved to be among the best armed, disciplined, and organized of all the European-led contingents that marched in relief to Peking. And when the Russo-Japanese War broke out in 1904, the Japanese, although vastly outnumbered, quickly proved not only that their naval and land forces were better structured and disciplined than the much larger Russian contingents but that their guns, ships, ammunition, and modern methods of supply were vastly superior as well. Their naval gunfire was especially deadly, and applied with far better accuracy and rates of fire and at greater distances than the Russians’.
In one of the most remarkable revolutions in the history of arms, Japan found herself in more than a quarter century (1870–1904) the near military equal of the best of European powers. Although lacking the population and natural resources of its immediate neighbors Russia and China, Japan had proved that with a topflight Westernized military it could defeat forces far greater in number. Japan is thus the classic refutation of the now popular idea that topography, resources such as iron and coal deposits, or genetic susceptibility to disease and other natural factors largely determine cultural dynamism and military prowess. The Japanese mainland was unchanging—before, during, and after its miraculous century-long military ascendancy—but what was not static was its radical nineteenth-century emulation of elements of the Western tradition completely foreign to its native heritage.
Not only were Japanese admirals and generals dressed and titled like their European counterparts, their ships and guns were nearly identical as well. Unfortunately for their Asian adversaries, the Westernized Japanese military was not a mere passing phase. Japan envisioned Western arms and tactics not as an auxiliary to centuries-long Japanese military doctrines or as a veneer of ostentation, but as a radical, fundamental, and permanent restructuring of Japan’s armed forces that would lead to hegemony in Asia.
Yet the Japanese wide-scale adoption of Western technology was also not always what it seemed at first glance. There remained stubborn Japanese cultural traditions that would resurface to hamper a truly un-blinkered Western approach to scientific research and weapons development. The Japanese had always entertained an ambiguous attitude about their own breakneck efforts at Westernization:
After the visit of Perry, the Japanese had to admit that Western technology, if not all other aspects of Western culture, was also far superior to her own. Admissions like these would be unsettling for any people, and they were especially galling for the Japanese because, more than most peoples on earth, they were imbued with a sense of the greatness, the inherent superio
rity, even the divinity of their own “Yamato” race. The ambivalence of the Japanese about their worthiness was palpably painful. Because many felt inferior, they came to fear and hate Westerners as they had earlier feared and hated the Chinese. When Westerners later proved to be vulnerable, the temptation to destroy them grew. (R. Edgerton, Warriors of the Rising Sun, 306)
Most unfortunate was the official stance of the Japanese government that slowly sought to form a systematic apology for the admitted incongruity of a country adopting wholesale the technology and industrial processes of an entirely different—and purportedly corrupt and barbaric—culture. The eventual answer that emerged was framed in mostly racist and chauvinist terms: Europeans were derided not merely as decadent, ugly, smelly, and self-centered but also as innately spoiled, pampered, and soft—lazy men who triumphed only through clever inventions and machines rather than the inherent courage of their manhood.
Already by the early twentieth century, a sophisticated Japanese exegesis was crystallizing about the entire relationship between European technology and Japanese culture: Japan’s was a superior warrior race that had merely grafted ideas from abroad to allow its more heroic fighters to compete on a level playing field. Thus, while industrialists and research scientists would proceed with modernizing the Japanese economy and military along European lines, the populace at large would remain a largely hierarchical, autocratic, and Asian society—notions of Western liberalism were to be rejected as vehemently as European science was to be emulated.
Japan would continue to be governed by arcane notions of shame that dictated every aspect of public behavior, delineating how the average Japanese might express emotion, act in public, and spend money on housing and material goods. Devotion to the emperor would be absolute. Individualism in the decadent Western sense would not follow on the heels of the importation of European technology. The military would enjoy almost total control of the government. Thus, the classic paradox immediately arose: could modern and rapidly evolving Western arms and military organization be integrated into a static Japanese culture without the accompanying political and cultural baggage of individualism, consensual government, laissez-faire capitalism, and free expression? It is one argument of this book that the Western way of war is grounded not merely in technological supremacy but in an entire array of political, social, and cultural institutions that are responsible for military advantages well beyond the possession of sophisticated weapons. Superior technology cannot merely be imported; if it is not to become immediately static and therefore obsolete, the accompanying practices of free inquiry, the scientific method, unfettered research, and capitalist production must be adopted as well.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Page 47