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Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully

2021 Contest•28 min read•6,140 words•View original

I: What is this book, and why am I reviewing it?

It’s a book about the Pacific War of WW2, with a particular focus on the Battle of Midway. It’s emotional, but highly detailed and technical, aimed at people who are already knowledgeable on the subject, or at least who have already read other books about it.

That is not me. I've really only read this one book on the Pacific war, plus various blog posts/wiki articles. And, uh, video games. I realize this is an area that is endlessly studied by both professionals and amateurs of all sorts, so compared to them I'm missing a lot. I expect a lot of push-back and technical criticism on this review, because I’m almost certainly getting some of the details wrong. Still, I do think that I at least know more than the average layperson, and I hope you can learn something from it too. Take it as an interesting story, both about the war and the vicissitudes of life in general.

I read this book because so many WW2 internet discussions recommended it. I kept seeing a pattern of like:

Person A: Long, detailed, plausible-sounding argument about the Pacific war, particularly about how the Japanese could have won at Midway

Person B: Have you read Shattered Sword? It totally debunks all your arguments

Actually, I've seen that a lot with WW2 internet arguments in general. I always found it frustrating. First, who has time to go read a full book just so they can respond to a short internet discussion? You're telling me to go read hundreds of pages before I can respond to a couple of paragraphs. Also, you have to go out and find some dusty old dinosaur book, when digital knowledge is flowing all around you on the information superhighway. Still, I kept seeing this particular book being recommended, and I really felt like all the free internet sources were lacking, so I gave it a shot and read a book.

(cue the Reading Rainbow theme song...)

Long story short, it's a good book. It's very technical and informative, but still easy to read for a layman. It combines both a high-level strategic view of the war with very human stories about the individuals involved. It lays out in detail the quirkiness of the naval forces involved (they’re kind of modern, using steel ships and oil engines almost as fast as the ones today, but also not- manual targeting, no radar, and the “carriers” were often just wooden decks built on top of an old battlecruiser). It's an inspiring war story of a huge victory for the Allies, while still acknowledging the suffering of the soldiers on the "other" side. It’s clear that the authors were very diligent and did a lot of research- in particular, on Japanese primary sources that were previously unknown to American writers.

However, I found myself disagreeing with many of their conclusions, especially the ones that weren’t quite stated directly. They start with a list of what they call myths about the battle, of which “correcting these distortions is the overriding goal of this book”. They present themselves as being smart, dispassionate observers, correcting the mistakes of people who are caught up in emotions (Miracle at Midway is an example of the kind of book they’re arguing against). In some cases there were also outright lies from the Japanese officers, which were used as primary sources by naive Western authors. Basically, they argue that the results of the battle were not a “miracle” at all, but rather to be expected, and almost inevitable when properly understood.

Oddly, the more they argue against these “myths” the more I found myself believing them. At least the essence of them, if not the specific details. You could call it a form of the "Streisand Effect". The authors assume that everyone reading the book has bought into those “myths” based on Hollywood movies and flawed earlier works. Personally, I didn't even know the myths, except insofar as they showed up in Star Wars movies (more on this later), so their “corrections” actually introduced the myths to me, and seemed more like nitpicks than takedowns.

Here’s the full list of what they call myths:

• The Americans triumphed against overwhelming odds at the Battle of Midway.

• The Aleutians Operation was conceived by Admiral Yamamoto, the commander in chief of Combined Fleet, as a diversion designed to lure the American fleet out of Pearl Harbor.

• During the transit to Midway, Admiral Yamamoto withheld important intelligence information from Admiral Nagumo, the operational commander of the carrier striking force. As a result, Nagumo was in the dark concerning the nature of the threat facing him.

• Had the Japanese implemented a two-phase reconnaissance search on the morning of 4 June, they would have succeeded in locating the American fleet in time to win the battle.

• The late launch of cruiser Tone’s No. 4 scout plane doomed Admiral Nagumo to defeat in the battle.

• Had Admiral Nagumo not decided to rearm his aircraft with land-attack weapons, he would have been in a position to attack the Americans as soon as they were discovered.

• The sacrifice of USS Hornet’s Torpedo Squadron Eight was not in vain, since it pulled the Japanese combat air patrol fighters down to sea level, thereby allowing the American dive-bombers to attack at 1020.

• Japan’s elite carrier aviators were all but wiped out during the battle.

I’m not going to go into detail on all of these like the book does, but suffice to say they all seem more like “exaggerations” than actual myths, even based solely on the arguments presented in the book. I was left with the distinct impression that, yes, the battle was won against the odds, and it was only through a combination of astoundingly bad Japanese command decisions and heroic sacrifices by American pilots that it was won at all, let alone as thoroughly and decisively as it was.

II: The gritty details

The bulk of this book is essentially a play-by-play of the battle itself, with commentary mixed in. It’s very detailed, very thorough, and hard to summarize- this is what the bulk of the book is about. I’m going to have to skip over a lot of this for the sake of brevity. Here are some representative quotes:

Back on board Kido Butai, the possibility of imminent air action had spurred Soryu into launching three fighters to augment the combat air patrol (CAP) at 0600. Hiryu followed suit at 0612.

...

Despite the hell they had just come through, Fleming’s men managed to bracket Hiryu with numerous near misses between 0808 and 0812, some as close as fifty meters from the ship.

...

At 0917, with the strike aircraft being struck below, Admiral Nagumo altered his course slightly to 070, still at battle speed 3 (twenty-two knots), to close the enemy, which he believed lay directly ahead.

It’s overflowing with details about individual ships, aircraft and personnel. I’ll try to summarize it in a way that just gives the main points, but I wanted to give a taste of how much detail went into this book. I’m going to have to gloss over most of that detail for the purposes of this review.

Should I give a spoiler warning? If you didn't know, the battle of Midway was a HUGE victory for the Americans, and for the Allies in general. From Pearl Harbor(December 7, 1941) until Midway (June 4, 1942) the IJN was “in the lead”, having both more and better ships than anything the US had available in the Pacific. It ran a series of long range offensive missions, almost all of them successful. It sank ships from the British, Dutch, and US navies, while invading most of Southeast Asia. The Battle of Midway completely reversed that position- after that battle the US largely controlled the open ocean, while Japan could only defend near islands it controlled or launch night raids.

Midway itself is a very small island, mostly underwater, with just enough land for a single airstrip. It’s only strategic value was its position: 1,800 km west of Hawaii, roughly halfway between the US and Japan. The Pacific ocean there is remarkably empty, so there was nowhere else to put a military base.

The battle was mostly fought, and won, by aircraft carriers. Partly this was random chance: The US had all of its battleships sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor, leaving only its aircraft carriers available (this was a lucky fluke, since they just happened to be away on a training mission when the attack came). But it was also a result of how dominant and effective carriers were at this time- the IJN had several battleships and other heavy surface ships available, but still relied mostly on its carriers. Both sides had submarines, but they were quite slow and limited. You can’t totally ignore the other ships involved, but you can simplify a lot by focusing solely on the carriers.

This applies to analyzing the results of the battle, too. The Japanese brought 4 aircraft carriers to Midway, and lost all four. The Americans brought 3, and lost only one (which was actually sunk by a submarine after the main battle had ended). I’m going to borrow Scott’s Simplicio/Sophisticus device to talk about these results, paraphrasing how the book describes it:

Simplicio: Splash 4 carriers! Boom!

Sophisticus: Don't be so simplistic. Sure, a carrier is a big obvious loss, but the more important losses are intangible. Morale, the loss of experienced pilots, the unit coherence of an experienced carrier air group, the loss of strategic momentum, etc...

Simplicio: No, don't overthink this. The really important loss was the carriers themselves, especially the big fleet carriers(as opposed to escort carriers, which were much smaller and more limited). The Japanese had very limited shipbuilding capacity compared to the allies. They built most of their ships with help from British ship designers and resource imports from before the war. During the war, they struggled to build ships, especially really big ships like fleet carriers. Fleet carriers(as opposed to small escort carriers) were the only ships capable of launching a really effective air strike. They built a grand total of one purpose-built fleet carrier during the war, the Taihō, which was started before Pearl Harbor and not finished until 1944. The Japanese had a lot of other pilots and other aircraft, and continuously produced more of each during the war- they just didn't have any good place to launch them from, especially when trying to fight over small pacific islands with no good runways. Without carriers, the Japanese basically couldn’t bring sufficient aircraft to any fight that wasn't near their home islands.

It’s strange to think of the US navy ever being behind in ships. It massively outproduced Japan (and every other navy combined) during the war. But in 1942, none of those ships were finished yet. All it had actually available were relatively small numbers of ships built before the war, some of them quite old or with bad designs. The Japanese, on the other hand, had gone all out to build up their navy in preparation for the war, and had attacked Pearl Harbor at the peak of naval readiness. Here’s how the book describes the situation:

In this modern era of unchallenged American naval supremacy, merely restoring parity may not seem like much of an accomplishment. But it must be recalled that Midway was fought “between one navy at the peak of its strength and another if not at its nadir then close to it.”23 In the dark months of 1942, being able to claw back to parity was an enormous achievement.

In terms of fleet carriers, the Japanese actually had a lead in raw numbers at Midway: four for them, vs three for the US. You could count the island of Midway itself as as carrier too (it's a very small island, practically a coral reef, with just enough room for a single airstrip and roughly the same number of planes as a carrier). But that still just puts the numbers even-steven. It almost seems like fiction, or like something from a computer game: “4v4@Midway, no noobs”.

It's something of a stroke of luck for the Americans that they even managed to have even numbers at Midway. The authors go into quite a bit of detail on this subject, arguing that it was a mix of incompetence and arrogance on the part of the Japanese navy. They had started the war with a total of 8 large carriers. 6 of them were used for the attack on Pearl Harbor. They assigned two carriers on a totally pointless mission to attack one of the US Aleutian islands, which is now known as the "Forgotten Battle". Two others were damaged a few months before Midway, at the Battle of Coral Sea- they were eventually repaired, but the Japanese showed no urgency in getting them ready for Midway at all. This left only four- just half!- of their large carriers for this battle, despite it being a battle of critical importance. They also had several smaller carriers which were not used.

To put this in perspective: let's imagine that the US was faced with a HUGE emergency. Like some sort of pandemic, threatening to rapidly infect the entire nation and kill massive numbers of people. And there was a way, albeit difficult and dangerous, to rapidly develop a vaccine or distribute it faster but the bureaucracy in charge totally denied it, instead insisting on following all the standard rules and regulations to the letter, unwilling to try anything at all unconventional to speed up the process. Good thing that would never happen here!

Meanwhile, the USS Yorkown (also damaged at Coral Sea) was estimated to need 90 days of repair: The US Navy did it in three, by working nonstop and cutting a lot of corners, because they understood that this was an absolute, no-holds-barred emergency. To make a long story short: despite its massive advantage in shipbuilding and industrial production, it was rather fortunate that the US could even manage even numbers of carriers/runways at Midway (4 each), rather than being significantly outnumbered.

And of course, raw numbers don't tell the whole story. Quality matters just as much, if not more. The IJN flight crews were all extremely experienced. Japan had been at war (formally) with China since 1937, and informally even before that. Their carrier crews trained extensively for the attack on Pearl Harbor, and had followed it up with attacks on British, Dutch, and American targets all around the Pacific, almost all of them successful. The US had been unexpectedly pulled into the war with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and had only one significant battle since then. Coral Sea). Compared to the IJN, the US Navy was a bunch of rookies at this point, especially in carrier strike operations. Here’s how the book describes the difference:

Japan’s carrier force in particular was truly without peer. At Pearl Harbor it demonstrated a level of sophistication that the U.S. Navy would not be able to replicate for another two years. Whereas the Allies were still using their flight decks singly or in pairs, Japan had used six fleet carriers to sweep American airpower aside and smash a major naval base in broad daylight. In terms of their ability to use massed airpower, the Imperial Navy had no rival. Japan’s pilots were war hardened, supremely aggressive, and highly skilled. Likewise, Japanese carrier aircraft–epitomized by the marvelous Mitsubishi Zero–were in many cases superior to those used by the U.S. Navy at this stage of the war.

The IJN had an advantage in weaponry, too. At the time, there were essentially three ways of sinking a ship.

  • Really big guns, like the kind on a battleship
  • Torpedoes, fired either from a submarine or from a torpedo-bomber plane
  • Bombs, dropped either high above from a level bomber, or from a dive bomber swooping down close to the target

The IJN had proven capable at using all three of these. There was Pearl Harbor, of course, when it used dive bombers with deadly accuracy. It used torpedo bombers to destroy the only British battleship and battlecruiser in the Pacific just three days after Pearl Harbor, and then a submarine torpedoed a US carrier, the Saratoga, in January, which prevented it from taking part in Midway. Its battleships didn’t have much to do, but they were still highly capable and feared.

The USN, on the other hand, was not. First, all of its Pacific battleships were sunk or heavily damaged at Pearl Harbor, so that option was completely gone. Its torpedoes were the victim of the Great Torpedo Scandal, which led to some alarming incidents, like hitting targets and not exploding, or even turning around to fire on their own ship (!):

"It tended to run "circular", failing to straighten its run once set on its prescribed gyro-angle setting, and instead, to run in a large circle, thus returning to strike the firing ship. "

One US submarine, the Nautilus, actually caught sight of the Japanese fleet before Midway, and had a chance to attack a battleship. But it suffered some difficulies:

Brockman [the captain], though, was having problems setting up his attack. One of his torpedoes was running hot in its tube, having had its retaining pin sheered away during the depth charging. It was making a hellacious racket, and Brockman was certain that the Japanese escorts could hear its banshee wailing. Nagumo’s fleet–what little Brockman could see of it–was still on a westerly heading when Nautilus fired at 0825. His target was Kirishima. Taking aim at her starboard side, Brockman let fly with two torpedoes at a range of 4,500 yards. Or at least he thought he did–he found out later that one tube did not fire, leaving only one fish streaking toward the target.

The US navy's torpedo bomber was, to put it mildy, flawed:

The Devastator proved to be a death trap for its crews: slow and hardly maneuverable, with poor armor for the era; its speed on a glide-bombing approach was a mere 200 mph (320 km/h), making it easy prey for fighters and defensive guns alike. The aerial torpedo could not even be released at speeds above 115 mph (185 km/h).[19] Torpedo delivery requires a long, straight-line attack run, making the aircraft vulnerable, and the slow speed of the aircraft made them easy targets for the Mitsubishi A6M Zeros.[20] Only four TBDs made it back to Enterprise, none to Hornet and two to Yorktown, without scoring a torpedo hit.

In terms of actual, functioning weapon systems available at Midway, the USN only really had bombs. And here again, there were issues. Dropping bombs from a high altitude (like from a regular bomber) was too inaccurate and slow- the IJN carriers could simply watch them falling and steer somewhere else, as seen in this photo. You don’t normally think of a huge ship like an aircraft carrier “dodging”, but compared to a primitive bomb being dropped from 10,000 feet, it could dodge very easily.

That leaves dive bombing, a hair-raising technique of flying almost vertically down, only to pull out at the last minute and release its bomb directly on top of the target. Here's how the Germans tested their dive bombers:

It was discovered that the highest load a pilot could endure was 8.5 g for three seconds, when the aircraft was pushed to its limit by the centrifugal forces. At less than 4 g, no visual problems or loss of consciousness were experienced.[29] Above 6 g, 50% of pilots suffered visual problems, or greyout. With 40%, vision vanished altogether from 7.5 g upwards and black-out sometimes occurred.[30] Despite this blindness, the pilot could maintain consciousness and was capable of "bodily reactions". After more than three seconds, half the subjects passed out. The pilot would regain consciousness two or three seconds after the centrifugal forces had dropped below 3 g and had lasted no longer than three seconds. In a crouched position, pilots could withstand 7.5 g and were able to remain functional for a short duration. In this position, Junkers concluded that ​2⁄3 of pilots could withstand 8 g and perhaps 9 g for three to five seconds without vision defects which, under war conditions, was acceptable.[31]

This sounds extremely difficult and dangerous! It also sounds like something you'd need a lot of training and experience to handle well. Even before the war, it was seen as difficult and dangerous, worthy of a Hollywood movie starring Errol Flynn. Unfortunately, the USN had only gotten its dive bombers in 1941, giving little time for their pilots to learn.

There were also fighters, designed to shoot down enemy planes rather than attacking surface targets. The Japanese had the Zero: fast, long range, and highly maneuverable, although lightly armored. The Americans had the Wildcat: more armor, but slower and less maneuverable. A decent plane, but here's how the book describes the balance before Midway:

To this point in the war, aerial combat had been pretty much a one-way street for Zero pilots–they dished it out, and the enemy died.

Suffice it to say, the Japanese planes at Midway had a qualitative advantage in almost every respect. The authors of Shattered Sword argue that it was a myth that the Japanese had overwhelming numbers, because only a small portion of those numbers were actually used at Midway, and so the Americans had equal or greater numbers of aircraft at the battle. That's true, but it's worth remembering how poor the American aircraft at the battle were. Out of about American 350 aircraft, the only ones actually capable of sinking a Japanese ship were the 100 or so carrier-born dive bombers with mostly limited experience. The IJN had only 250 aircraft, but all of them were proven to be highly capable machines, while their crews also had more experience and training. That might not be "overwhelming", but it was a large advantage.

The battle itself happened in stages, as various groups of aircraft encountered their targets. It started with the Japanese bombing the island of Midway itself, heavily damaging it and destroying most of its marine corps fighter defenders. Shortly after, the bombers from the island attempted to attack the Japanese carriers, but couldn't do much- they either missed or were shot down. After that, the American carrier-launched planes arrived. First, the torpedo bombers were all shot down, while the American fighters were too slow to offer protection. Finally, the dive bombers arrived, which managed to break through and deal critical damage to three of the four Japanese carriers. The surviving Japanese carrier launched a counterattack which heavily damaged (but didn’t quite sink) one American carrier, and was itself sunk by another American carrier strike later that day, again delivered by dive bombers.

I'm skimming over a lot in that one paragraph- that's about half of the book! The authors argue at length about why individual commanders acted as they did, in particular the Japanese captains and admirals. There’s a lot of discussion about, say, why wasn’t the Japanese air defense better, or why didn’t they launch their own strike sooner. They do a good job of justifying all of the individual decisions, making it seem like they were all either lacking key information, or following protocol, or just didn't have time to think properly. For example, this is how they explain the disorganized Japanese air defense:

Nagumo was stuck on board a wildly maneuvering carrier, watching his other vessels running pell-mell in all directions. Every time it looked as if things were settling down a bit, another air raid warning would come in. Nagumo can hardly have known where all his ships were at any given time, let alone have had an appreciation of what his aggregate CAP strength was.

The implication from all of this commentary on command is that victory was mostly inevitable for the Americans. The Japanese did everything about as well as they could, but there was just no stopping it. And they do argue this very well, with a ton of details and primary sources that I'm not at all qualified to debunk.

But that won't stop me from trying! Let's go back to that battle summary. To reiterate, all of the Japanese carriers were sunk by American dive bombers- the level bombers simply missed, and the torpedo bombers were shot down like flies. One of carriers was destroyed entirely by one guy, Richard Best, who had the awesome power of nominative determinism far more experience, training, and skill than most American pilots (he had served on one of the very first US carriers, been a flight instructor for a while, and then specifically requested a transfer back to being a combat pilot again). There was a screw-up during the attack, which led to all of the American dive bombers targeting just one Japanese carrier- Best was the only who realized the mistake and went after the other (with his wingmen), and he was the only one who hit it, doing fatal damage with just the one bomb (it started a fire which burned out of control). The carrier he hit, the Akagi, was in the process of launching its own strike against the American carriers, which it almost certainly would have sunk, given how good the IJN was at that sort of thing (they were bad at defense, but the world leader at offensive air strikes). Later that day, Best attacked the remaining Japanese carrier, Hiryū, and there's at least one witness who says that he was one of the few that hit it.

In other words, this one guy, by himself, managed to

  • definitely destroy one Japanese carrier, the Akagi
  • probably save an American carrier, Enterprise, from destruction
  • possibly lead to the destruction of another Japanese carrier, since it was the planes from the Enterprise that sank her, with Best among them

So a lot of the battle's key results simply come from the actions of this one guy. I still can't get over how incredible that is. You usually hear arguments about whether battles were decided by strategies and tactics from the commanders, or larger technical and economic factors. But here, it's just one individual soldier being really good at his job. As an "individual contributor" myself, I can't help but find that inspiring.

Also, I can't waste the chance to use this quote:

In the words of his backseater, Aviation Chief Radioman James F. Murray, “Nobody pushed his dive steeper or held it longer than Dick.”

Sorry. I'll now return to the high-brow, sophisticated content that SSC readers expect.

III: Analysis and Takeaways

The book itself kind of downplays Best's actions. They agree that it was him who scored the critical hit on the Akagi. But they spend more time arguing against myths in other descriptions of the battle. One of the myths that the book sets out to debunk is the "Five Fateful Minutes"- a story (written by Mitsuo Fushida, a Japanese pilot) that the Akagi was only five minutes away from launching its own strike, so Best's hit came at the perfect time when its deck was full of fully-loaded planes about to take off. Apparently this was true, it would have taken "at least thirty" for their strike to be ready, and the planes were still below deck.

But I think it hardly matters- 5 minutes or an hour, planes on deck or below, that's still a very narrow window of time that decided the battle, all from one bomb hit. Fushida might have been wrong about the details, but I think he was right about the essence here. If Best had missed, or had simply followed orders instead of taking initiative for himself, there was no one else who could have destroyed Akagi before it launched its attack. And while it's well known that Star Wars borrows heavily from WW2 air battles, this sounds almost exactly like the plot of the movie! The Death Star is just about to fire its Superlaser that would destroy the Rebel base, and Luke has just one chance to make a precisely aimed hit to destroy it before it can fire. Points to Star Wars for being... historically accurate?

Another point of comparison to Star Wars must be made. In Star Wars, the enemy is some sort of evil empire ("The Empire"). Imperial Japan was a real life evil empire. I'm not going to be neutral here- The US did some bad things too (in particular, its internment camps and its bombing attacks on civilian targets later in the war), but nothing on the same level as what Imperial Japan and its military did. They were invading every country they could, massacring millions of civilians, and committing atrocities so horrible that I don't even want to think about them.

The tone of this book, on this issue, is surprisingly neutral. They mostly gloss over the war crimes of the Japanese military, make fun of other works which call the US "good guys" and do some amateur psychoanalyzing to try and justify what the IJN was doing. Here's one representative section:

To the average Westerner, steeped in the winner’s history of World War II, any attempt to justify Japan’s war in terms of Pan-Asian liberation is simply so much hogwash. The Japanese were aggressors, the Allies liberators, and everything from a moral standpoint has been very much cut and dried for half a century. The prevailing American attitude toward the war was crystallized as soon as the first Japanese bomb fell on Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto’s “sneak” attack simply put an exclamation point on the writ of contemporary American moral outrage over previous Japanese aggressions in Asia.

Yet, despite the fundamental validity of these Western views, it is important to recall that at some level the Japanese people sincerely believed they were fighting for a larger cause, whose intrinsic good was undeniable. If they were also capable of ignoring the social injustices and outright atrocities–which were many and sordid– that accrued under this banner, then that sublimation came about from a conviction that achieving the larger goal of destroying Western colonialism somehow justified the means employed. This long-standing rationalization lies at the core of Japan’s inability to examine and condemn its own wartime actions with anything approaching the sincerity and candor that its victims feel is required.

I strongly disagree with that view. Perhaps it had some merit in the past as a reaction against the movies and popular fiction of the 1950s which portrayed the American military as glorious heroes who could do no wrong. But it is simply incorrect to make it seem as though the aggression and atrocities of the Japanese military was in any way justified. They were evil (as a whole, not every single individual of course), and any victory against them deserves to be celebrated just as much as the storming of Normandy on D-Day or the Battle of Stalingrad. There should not be any moral hesitation in openly celebrating the American victory at Midway.

Going back to Science Fiction- you know that ship from Star Trek? The Enterprise? It was named after a real ship- the Enterprise! It's the most decorated ship in US history, and arguably the single most effective warship of all time. For a while, after Midway, the Enterprise was the *only* functioning US carrier in the Pacific, which led to an iconic picture of its crew with a sign saying "Enterprise vs Japan." Quoting Wikipedia on its service record: “By the end of the war, her planes and guns had downed 911 enemy planes, sunk 71 ships, and damaged or destroyed 192 more.” That ship utterly wrecked the IJN, and it sometimes did so with very little support. That's the ship that launched strikes that sunk two carriers and Midway, and likely would have been destroyed if the Akagi had been able to launch its strike. I find it interesting that the ship in Star Trek is portrayed as a peaceful, humanitarian vessel that only uses its weapons as a last resort. The real life Enterprise was the opposite of peaceful, but it still deserves to be celebrated.

Here's the part where we play what-if. What if the Japanese had won an overwhelming victory at Midway, sinking all the American carriers while losing none of their own? Could that have led to them winning the war?

No, not a chance. The book goes through this quickly at the end, and dismisses it as insane. ("At most, the defeat at Midway cost the Japanese approximately eighteen months of strategic leverage that their four carriers might have bought them.") However, it would have been a longer war, and many people would have died each single day that it went on. That's why it's important to celebrate the victories, without thinking too hard about weird alternative histories. The more likely alternative history is that the US could have avoided being aggressive, and simply waited for all their new ships to finish being built- it’s heroic, and commendable, that they were as aggressive as they were despite their lack of numbers.

A more reasonable question would be, could the Japanese have won this particular battle? The authors make it seem like they couldn't. They never quite come out and say so directly, but whenever they discuss the decisions made by Japanese commanders, they make them seem reasonable and inevitable given the circumstances and their overall strategy, doctrine, and culture.

But then the book admits that, yes, all of those decisions ended up losing them the battle. It almost seems like every single decision they made regarding the battle was wrong:

  • Why attack at all? Midway island itself wasn't valuable.
  • Why not realize their codes had been compromised? Or have better codes to begin with.
  • Why attack with half their carriers? Sending fewer (or none) would have been less of a loss. Sending more would have had overwhelming numbers in the air.
  • Why send the carriers charging in first, while the battleships and other ships hung back too far to do anything? Or even send them in ahead?
  • Why put up just a minimal amount of scouts? They didn't have radar, so they really needed more scouts. Instead they were totally caught by surprise.
  • Why was their fighter defense so disorganized? They just sort of flew around randomly, and eventually got caught completely in the wrong position.
  • Why were their ships so vulnerable, especially to fire?

There are reasons for all these given in the book, but they're not especially good reasons. They all basically amount to either "that's just the way things were done in Imperial Japan and its navy, and no individual commander could possibly change that" or "under the stress and chaos of the situation, no one could have known better." E.g., part of the reason they were so vulnerable to fire was that only officers were allowed to know how to fight fires, not regular crewman. They attacked with only part of their fleet, because they thought the Americans would be too scared to come out and fight if they sent everything. Seen in that light, where no decisions can be changed, I suppose it’s true that the outcome was inevitable. But it seems odd that a victory which depends on the opponent screwing up everything in the worst way could be seen as "inevitable". And even despite all those bad decisions, it still ended up being decided by a small number of bomb hits by American dive bomber pilots, particularly the one by Best on the Akagi.

So I came away from this book conflicted. The authors clearly did a massive amount of research on the battle, and they managed to convey a ton of technical detail in a way that was still readable. They persuasively argued all of their individual points. But there was still this not-quite-outright-stated tone to it that I found myself disagreeing with. Perhaps some earlier books on Midway had gone a little too far in hyping it and they wanted to correct them, fine. But they went too far in the other direction to make it seem almost inevitable and not worth celebrating. Even with all their arguments to the contrary, Midway still seems like an incredible victory to me.