The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) by Craig L. Symonds Page A
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Authors: Craig L. Symonds
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not only with a better understanding of the strategies, operational details, and tactics of this pivotal battle but with greater appreciation for the men whose decisions and actions made it happen.
James M. McPherson
THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY
INTRODUCTION
I n a series that focuses on historical contingency, it is appropriate, perhaps even essential, to include the Battle of Midway, for there are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as it did on June 4, 1942. At ten o’clock that morning, the Axis powers were winning the Second World War. Though the Red Army had counterattacked the Wehrmacht outside Moscow in December, the German Army remained deep inside the Soviet Union, and one element of it was marching toward the oil fields of the Caucasus. In the Atlantic, German U-boats ravaged Allied shipping and threatened to cut the supply line between the United States and Great Britain. In the Pacific, Japan had just completed a triumphant six-month rampage, attacking and wrecking Allied bases from the Indian Ocean to the mid-Pacific following the crippling of the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor. Japan’s Mobile Striking Force (the Kidō Butai) was at that moment on the verge of consolidating command of the Pacific by eliminating what the strike at Pearl Harbor had missed: America’s aircraft carriers. The outcome of the war balanced on a knife-edge, but clearly leaned toward the Axis powers.
An hour later, the balance had shifted the other way. By 11:00 a.m., three Japanese aircraft carriers were on fire and sinking. A fourth was launching a counterstrike, yet before the day was over, it too would be located and mortally wounded. The Japanese thrust was turned back. Though the war had three more years to run, the Imperial Japanese Navy would never again initiate a strategic offensive. Later that summer the battle for Stalingrad began. The Atlantic sea lanes remained dangerous, but the convoys continued, and Britain survived. The war had turned.
In 1967, a quarter century after Midway, Walter Lord published a history of that battle entitled Incredible Victory. The title’s assumption is that the odds against the Americans at Midway were so long that their ultimate triumph defied comprehension. So dominant was this perception that when the national memorial to the Second World War was unveiled in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2004, a sentence from Lord’s book was chiseled into its marble façade in letters six inches high: “THEY HAD NO RIGHT TO WIN, YET THEY DID, AND IN DOING SO THEY CHANGED THE COURSE OF THE WAR.” Similarly, when Gordon Prange’s long-awaited book on Midway came out in 1982, brought to press by two of his former graduate students after his death, it bore the title Miracle at Midway. Once again, the implication was unmistakable.
Embedded in these books’ titles, and in their conclusions as well, is the supposition that the American victory at Midway was the product of fate, or chance, or luck, or even divine will. In fact, sixty years after the battle, when a group of Midway veterans conducted a survey asking who had played the most decisive role on the American side, one veteran insisted that, as in the days of the ancient Greeks, this improbable earthly event could be explained only as the result of divine intervention. 1
In War and Peace , Leo Tolstoy argues that great historical events, including (maybe even especially) great military events, are the product of historical forces only dimly understood. The great drama of the Napoleonic Wars, Tolstoy wrote, “came about step by step, incident by incident, moment by moment, emerging from an infinitely varied set of unimaginably different circumstances, and was perceived in its entirety only when it became a reality, a past event.” To him, individuals were not the prime movers of history but its victims, subject to “a boundless variety of infinitesimally small
James M. McPherson
THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY
INTRODUCTION
I n a series that focuses on historical contingency, it is appropriate, perhaps even essential, to include the Battle of Midway, for there are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as it did on June 4, 1942. At ten o’clock that morning, the Axis powers were winning the Second World War. Though the Red Army had counterattacked the Wehrmacht outside Moscow in December, the German Army remained deep inside the Soviet Union, and one element of it was marching toward the oil fields of the Caucasus. In the Atlantic, German U-boats ravaged Allied shipping and threatened to cut the supply line between the United States and Great Britain. In the Pacific, Japan had just completed a triumphant six-month rampage, attacking and wrecking Allied bases from the Indian Ocean to the mid-Pacific following the crippling of the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor. Japan’s Mobile Striking Force (the Kidō Butai) was at that moment on the verge of consolidating command of the Pacific by eliminating what the strike at Pearl Harbor had missed: America’s aircraft carriers. The outcome of the war balanced on a knife-edge, but clearly leaned toward the Axis powers.
An hour later, the balance had shifted the other way. By 11:00 a.m., three Japanese aircraft carriers were on fire and sinking. A fourth was launching a counterstrike, yet before the day was over, it too would be located and mortally wounded. The Japanese thrust was turned back. Though the war had three more years to run, the Imperial Japanese Navy would never again initiate a strategic offensive. Later that summer the battle for Stalingrad began. The Atlantic sea lanes remained dangerous, but the convoys continued, and Britain survived. The war had turned.
In 1967, a quarter century after Midway, Walter Lord published a history of that battle entitled Incredible Victory. The title’s assumption is that the odds against the Americans at Midway were so long that their ultimate triumph defied comprehension. So dominant was this perception that when the national memorial to the Second World War was unveiled in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2004, a sentence from Lord’s book was chiseled into its marble façade in letters six inches high: “THEY HAD NO RIGHT TO WIN, YET THEY DID, AND IN DOING SO THEY CHANGED THE COURSE OF THE WAR.” Similarly, when Gordon Prange’s long-awaited book on Midway came out in 1982, brought to press by two of his former graduate students after his death, it bore the title Miracle at Midway. Once again, the implication was unmistakable.
Embedded in these books’ titles, and in their conclusions as well, is the supposition that the American victory at Midway was the product of fate, or chance, or luck, or even divine will. In fact, sixty years after the battle, when a group of Midway veterans conducted a survey asking who had played the most decisive role on the American side, one veteran insisted that, as in the days of the ancient Greeks, this improbable earthly event could be explained only as the result of divine intervention. 1
In War and Peace , Leo Tolstoy argues that great historical events, including (maybe even especially) great military events, are the product of historical forces only dimly understood. The great drama of the Napoleonic Wars, Tolstoy wrote, “came about step by step, incident by incident, moment by moment, emerging from an infinitely varied set of unimaginably different circumstances, and was perceived in its entirety only when it became a reality, a past event.” To him, individuals were not the prime movers of history but its victims, subject to “a boundless variety of infinitesimally small
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