Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parshall (2011)

well good morning we are now going to move on to Midway so if you'd be so kind as to put up the first slide I'm entitling this talk digging into the common mythos around Midway and next slide please what I'd like to accomplish today is a couple of things first of all I want to talk a little bit about the big picture and some of this is going to be review of where we are sort of in the strategic situation as a result of four or five months worth of combat in the Pacific and then I'm going to talk give you sort of a high-level view of what actually happened at the Battle of Midway as soon as I'm done with that I want to drill down a little bit and look at one event in particular that happened during this battle and start going through some of the primary sources I'm going to show you some things that Tony Tully and I use to write our book and as a result of that I think that we'll end up sort of reshaping that facet of the common wisdom around this particular battle next slide please all right setting the stage next slide so what has been going on up to this point is we've heard all through yesterday there's been a lot of activity in the Pacific Ocean during the first four or five months of this particular war of course we kicked things off at Pearl Harbor there were simultaneous operations aimed at Guam and wake the Japanese invaded Hong Kong they sank the Prince of Wales and repulse off of Malaya and then put troops ashore on the Malayan Peninsula and begin driving down toward Singapore next slide please the result of those first phase operations is very successful for the Japanese and they accelerate their time schedule and start initiating a second series of operations which results in various battles in the Java Sea we of course have the carrier raid against support Darwin in northern Australia after Rabaul has been taken Singapore Falls at the end of February which is a calamity for British arms and as a result of all of this you know by about the March February time frame it's pretty clear that the Japanese are going to secure all of the economic aims that they had gone to war for in the first place they're going to get the oil they're going to get the rubber and ten the other raw materials and not incidentally they will have ended up crushing white colonialism throughout their area of operations which is a pretty big deal as far as they're concerned so next slide please the question then starts being asked you know well what do we do now where do we go from here and the Japanese run through a number of different options of things that they might want to do some of these we've discussed yesterday we could have we could invade Australia we could potentially go into the Indian Ocean we can move down the Solomon Islands change towards Fiji and Samoa and cut Australia off its supply lines from the US so there's a great deal of back-and-forth at this point and frankly a fair amount of political skullduggery on the part of the Imperial Navy but at the end of the day Admiral Yamamoto wins the bureaucratic in fight necessary to have his vision for Pacific strategy be the one that is carried forward and we end up having a battle at the site of Midway Island and it's going to be of contest of wills if you will between Yamamoto on the one hand and Admiral Nimitz on the other next slide please unfortunately for the Japanese we have broken their operational codes and although we are not by any means able to read all of their mail we are able to read sufficient of it that we get wind of what is going to happen here at the island of Midway which allows Nimitz to then position his forces in such a way that he can ambush the Japanese when they come in and at the end of the day on 4 June 1942 we're going to have a very evenly matched fight at the tip of the spear but what's going to go our way and we walk away from that battle having sunk four Japanese aircraft carriers and lost only one of our own next slide please so what does that do for us I would I would argue that you know even though I a book on the Battle of Midway Midway was not necessarily the most important or decisive naval battle ever but it certainly was very important in the Pacific War in terms of both short and long-term effects short term what it does is it destroys the Japanese carrier striking force which means that they are now deprived of their offensive capabilities and that in turn drags our offensive capabilities back up to a state of parity with the Japanese now you know in these days of unchallenged US naval might if you will in the world it's pretty hard to conceive of just being able to drag ourselves back to parity as being a big deal but in the dark days of 1942 having achieved that goal is a very big deal indeed because well that allows us to do is then start contemplating undertaking offensive actions of our own up to this point we've been reacting to Japanese moves and we've never had an opportunity to actually go after them well with Midway in the bag now all of a sudden people like admiral ernie king have got the option to maybe start doing some things of their own and very quickly what ends up happening is we take the offensive then at Guadalcanal it is the creation of the campaign in the Solomons coupled with the campaign in New Guinea which is going to create this sort of twin headed attritional monster that ends up eating up the Japanese naval and air forces and ground forces that's the kind of war that we as the more powerful opponent need to get our weaker opponent in to get them into a headlock and every day we're just beating them up so Midway is the gift that keeps on giving in that respect because it allows us to create the kind of war that we need to create in order to win the larger conflict next slide please so I want to talk a little bit about the common mythos of great battles and I'm going to read you a brief passage from my book we say that all great battles create their own unique mythos that is to say they become wrapped in a set of popular beliefs the common wisdom that interprets the battle and it's me meanings in many cases this mythology centers on one pivotal event some noteworthy occurrence that captures the imagination thereby crystallizing what that battle was all about history is replete with such defining moments the breaking of the French Imperial Guard at Waterloo Pickett's charge at Gettysburg the siege of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge they are timeless events and not to be reinterpreted lightly yet it is imperative that such momentous happenings be understood properly for if these are the lenses through which we perceive great battles then it stands to reason that any flaws on these crystals must necessarily distort our perception of the battle as a whole so if I had to you know give the the primary pivotal event within the Battle of Midway I would argue that it is next slide please this one the 10:20 dive bomber attack against the Japanese carrier striking force next slide it is that attack that shifts the the momentum of that battle and essentially means that we're going to win it because during that attack in a space of four or five minutes as we heard dusty Kleiss on the oral history say we put three Japanese carriers out of action and it's pretty clear that we're going to end up winning that battle and I would submit that it is those mental images of dauntless --is hurtling down on Japanese flight decks that are packed chock-a-block with aircraft that are this close to taking off you know that is certainly an image that I had as a child when I was beginning to delve into naval history and I think it is one that pretty much any naval enthusiast would would relate to unfortunately there are aspects of that mental image that are incorrect and that's what I want to drill into in a little more detail right now next slide please so June 4th 1942 what we're going to be taking a look at is what was actually happening on the Japanese carrier flight decks during the course of that battle and one of the tools that I want to use to make that happen is another gentleman's book this is mitsuo Fujita's book Midway the battle to doom Japan Fujita's big shot he's very important he was the air group commander on the ACOG II he was the strike leader at Pearl Harbor of course and he was at the Battle of Midway as well although he did not fly that day because he had had an appendicitis and he was invalid but he wrote a book in 1951 that was then translated into English in 1955 and this book in conjunction with a couple of other primary sources is pretty much the key stone for a lot of the Western accounts on the Battle of Midway that get written so we're going to use him and see what he says about what's going on on the flight decks next slide please so carrier operations 101 the thing you need to keep in mind while we're going through this examination is that we are living in the age before angled flight-deck aircraft carriers which means that our carrier can only be doing one thing at a time it can be spotting aircraft which means pulling them out of the hangars moving them up to the flight deck and getting them ready to launch we can be launching those aircraft or we can be recovering aircraft and particularly in the case of the latter when we're recovering that flight deck is shut down we cannot be doing anything else except bringing planes aboard the aircraft carrier okay so let's just keep that in mind next slide please all right let's do a brief walk through the battle phase one next slide oh four thirty this is the situation we have the Japanese carrier for sceeto blue tide coming in from the northwest and a distance of about 250 nautical miles away from the island of Midway which you see down in the bottom and then positioned off to the east-northeast unknowns the Japanese are the two American carrier task forces next slide please so at 4:30 flight operations commenced on board the Japanese carriers they send off a very powerful strike force against the island of Midway 108 aircraft under the command of a gentleman named tomonaga and let's see what happens on the flight decks according to Fujita after that after the planes have been launched the flight deck which moments before had been filled with a deafening din was now silent there were no planes no drone of engines but the stillness was again broken by the raucous loudspeaker blaring out an order prepare second attack wave to the accompaniment of banging bells playing soon we're being whisked up to the flight deck and rolled from the elevators they're lined up positions the forward elevators brought up fighters the midship and certain elevators delivered bombers maintenance crews wheeled torpedoes from the ammunition rooms and secured them to the planes All Hands work feverishly amber Yamamoto is given Admiral Nagumo and order that I want you to keep half of your planes in reserve for potential use against enemy ships if they are discovered and so that's what these storage planes are going to be doing and they are armed therefore with torpedoes and and armor-piercing or semi armor-piercing bombs at about Oh 6:30 Midway is attacked by tominaga group and around the same time the key to boot I comes under its first series of tax from some of the land-based air that is based at Midway and these attacks are repulsed relatively easily by the Japanese combat air patrol fighters and result in no damage to the Japanese at the same time though tomonaga radios back at about oh 700 and says we need a second attack against this objective I have not put it out of business we need to hit it again now at this point Nagumo's had Scout planes up in the air for several hours that he has received no word that there are any American naval forces in the area and so at oh seven fifteen he decides I am going to rearm my reserve strike planes and get them ready for a second attack on the bat on Midway so let's see what Fertitta says about that consequently at Oh 7:15 just as the American torpedo attack was ending Nagumo ordered the planes of the second wave which had been armed for the attack on enemy ships to prepare instead for another strike on Midway this meant that the torpedo Laden bombers on a cog in kaga had to be d armed and reloaded with bombs the ones already on the flight deck were taken down to the hangar one after another and the rearming process began so the image he's painting for us is reserve strike was up on deck now we're taking them back down below deck next slide please second phase of battle next slide so the situation is about this at around o 7:45 in the morning the Japanese have been closing towards Midway so that I can recover my Strikeforce when it comes back but then lo and behold out of the blue comes a sighting report from one of his Scout planes at O 745 saying I found something next slide please well this really throws a rock into the pigeons if you will this is a very unexpected event and Nagumo was not all happy to have this happen he immediately fires off a message back to this plane saying please ascertain not even please ascertain the ship types get on it and also immediately counter man's his rearming order and tells those planes to now switch back again to anti-ship weaponry so let's read what Fujita has to say about that it'd be good if I had my book not upside down on board a cog II when the order was given to clear the deck for recovery oh I guess I'm not there yep I'm sorry um in any case he issues another order which means we got to bring these planes back down to the hangar now and start actually you know rearming them at the same time he's got to make a decision I have got planes coming back from Midway am I going to recover those planes first or am I going to strike against the Americans right now and after kind of going through the numbers very quickly and very briefly he decides no I've got to bring my strike force back first I know that those planes are going to be low on gasoline they're going to have wounded aviators on him I need to bring them down so he makes the decision that he is going to do that before he then responses decks and goes off to attack the Americans so once onboard Akagi the order was given to clear the deck for recovery the weary maintenance crews began once more to lower the torpedo bombers to the hangar deck they're the orders now were to switch back from bombs to torpedoes so again the planes were up the planes were down the planes were up and now the planes are going back down a second time apparently into the hangar deck all right the problem now becomes for Nagumo that he starts running out of time because of the at the very moment that he starts making these dishes and decisions there's a second group of American air attacks that start materializing at around Oh 753 there's a group of dive bombers to come in and there's also some b-17s that start attacking spores and those planes are going to be over his head for the better part of 40 minutes just kind of buzzing around doing the thing they're not successful attacks the dive-bombers are chewed up very badly by the Japanese cap the b-17s are relatively immune but you know the result of their bombing attacks on the Japanese is they put a lot of bombs and go into the ocean so then at this point we now recover our strike planes at oh wait thirty seven as soon as the b-17s finally drone off to the distance Nagumo goes ahead and brings his his morning attack down and now he's thinking to himself okay fine I've got the morning attack down it's time to Reese pop my flight decks and go out and attack the Americans at this point next slide please third phase next slide please unfortunately for Nagumo as soon as he has these planes recovered lo and behold another series of attacks start coming in and these famously are the torpedo squadron attacks first from the Hornet this is V T 8 which is annihilated in the course of this engagement all planes shot down one man left live in the water as soon as V T 8 is destroyed by about oh nine thirty or so at Oh 940 V T six rolls in from the enterprise and is similarly very roughly handled so what ends up happening for Nagumo is he's not given an opportunity to actually get stuff up on his flight decks and he's reacting to American moves and unknown to him by the time that V T six is finally destroyed around 10:00 in the morning he has now been cited by two different groups of American aircraft there's two squadrons of dive bombers from the enterprise coming in from one direction and there's fine strike from the Yorktown coming in from the southeast so he's the Iceman Cometh if you will next slide please so this is sort of a schematic of what's been happening to Quito butai here since about 8:30 or so and what you see down in the south is the flat line there that's where we're recovering aircraft we then start moving off to the northeast to close the American carriers but lo and behold we are first attacked by V T 8 and our reaction to these attacks is we turn around and run because if I put my fans to a very slow torpedo plane it makes it a lot harder for that torpedo plane to close on me and it gives my cap fighters a lot more time to chew those guys up so my standard reaction is to run away from all of these attacks and what you see happening on with Keita butai is it's being shoved around VTA hits me I run to the I run to the west vt6 comes in from the south I start running to the to the northwest and so you can see now that Kido butai has been put in sort of a reactive mode if you will and finally what we have here is as I described we have the enterprise planes coming in from the southwest we have the Yorktown strike coming in from the southeast and this is the hammer an anvil that is going to do in the Japanese combat air patrol next slide please so now let's look a little bit at some of the primary sources next slide okay and just to sort of summarize where Fujita has painted for us he's basically painted us a picture where these reserve strike planes that were armed initially for any ship exercises have supposedly been put up on the flight deck taken down put up taken down you know twice during the course of this morning but that in Fujita's words by 1025 which is one this dive bomber attack from the Americans is going to occur all of those planes are now supposedly up on the flight decks are armed and are ready to go so that's that is the common wisdom that we've been handed down here for the last seventy years or so next slide please so the first thing I want to show you and don't get daunted by this but this is a schematic of the air operations that occur on all of the Japanese carriers and the important things to note are the little blue boxes would show us the duration of American attacks against the carrier force and the little yellow triangles which means I am bringing down combat Air Patrol fighters onto my flight deck and as you recall when I'm recovering aircraft that means that the fantail is completely occupied I cannot be spotting aircraft okay so the visual impression is a fairly busy one and that's exactly the right impression you should look at this and say these flight decks were busy busy places and that makes sense because there's a constant stream of American air tax coming in and not surprisingly the Japanese have got a cycle a lot of combat air patrol fighters up and down next slide please next thing we can look at is some actual photography that was taken during the battle and these were taken by those b-17s that we talked about that came in at Oh 753 and buzzed around until around oh oh a 30 or so so the first ship that we have is the soryu and we can see on her fan tail there in the very back there's one zero fighter position there but otherwise her flight deck is completely devoid of aircraft next slide please this is her sister ship to hear you on her deck amidships you'll see three zero fighters those are a combat watch number five of Lieutenant Mori shigeru who's going to be launched at oh eight twenty six we know this from the air group records next slide please and finally we have the force flagship this is the ACOG II and once again on her flight decks we see nada we see that this this dark blue square here on the flight deck that's her forward elevator that's where the fighters live so she's probably in the process of either taking fighters down or she's going to bring some up but the overall impression that we get when we look at these flight takes is there is nothing on these flight decks and actually the guy that first figured this out and brought it to my attention is John Lundstrom here he gave me a call in my office back in 1999 he's like what does this mean John why are there no planes on here and I had to respond I have no idea but that that gave me the impetus to then go out and start understanding a little bit better the deck mechanics around these these flight decks and how they actually operated them next slide please so I think sort of inner as an intermediate conclusion we have to look at the the photographic and the air operational evidence at hand and say to ourselves something doesn't smell right about Fujita's account this just doesn't seem to jibe with what we're seeing here in Fujita's book and so now let's actually take a look at at what Fujita says about the 10:25 attack and this is probably one of the best passages in his entire book he calls it five fateful minutes preparation for a counter-attack against the enemy had continued on board our four carriers throughout the enemy torpedo attacks VTA one after another planes were hoisted from the hangar and quickly arranged on the flight deck there was no time to lose at 10:20 Admiral Nagumo gave the orders to launch when ready on akagi's flight deck all planes were in position with engines warming up the big ship began turning into the wind within five minutes all her planes would be launched five minutes who would have believed that in that that the tide of battle would shift completely in that brief interval of time at 10:20 for the order to start launching came from the bridge by voice tube the air officers flapped the white flag and the first zero fighter gathered speed and whizzed off the deck at that instant a lookout screamed Helldivers I looked up to see three black enemy planes plummeting towards our ship so again the image that Fujita is painting for us is that our strike force is ready to go is just moments away from going and all of a sudden at the very last minute down from the American dive bombers and catastrophe ensues next slide please which brings me to carrier operations 102 so if we look at the math behind how long does it take to actually spot the strike force on my flight that you got to do a number of things I have to be pulling out my aircraft one at a time out of the hangar decks putting them on that elevator up to the flight deck and rolling them into position once they're there I've got our warm-up their engines because Japanese aircraft carriers have enclosed hangars with insufficient ventilation which means I can't warm up my engines down below like I could on an American carrier I got to bring them up topside I'm going to arm the dive bombers once they're on the flight deck and do some other nits and gnats but bottom line is from the time the Gumo says go it's going to take 45 minutes to put this flight deck or put the strike force together and get it on the flight deck get it warmed up and get it ready to go if I cut some corners I might be able to bring that down to half an hour but I've got to have 30 to 45 minutes wherein my flight deck is not being used for any other purposes okay all right let's move on next slide please which brings us to the part of the talk that I call fun with coda Cho shows and and you think of yourself what is a coat of Cho show and I'm glad you asked coda Cho shows are the detailed Japanese air group records that all of these ships kept and they give us a lot of really interesting information on what is happening within the air group they tell us the names of all of the pilots that got into an airplane that day we know when they went up we know when they came down we know how much ordnance they carried and what they expended they give us a lot of detail and from those records we can start deducing a lot of what's going on on that Japanese carrier for instance if I know that at a certain time I'm recovering aircraft per the coda Cho Cho that means that my carrier must be pointed into the wind so we can start to infer a lot about the movements of these carriers so let's take a look at a coda Cho show next slide please isn't this lovely yes it's actually not that hideous and that's why I've color-coded it for you but if we look on the upper left-hand corner in the yellow box there that is the kanji for ACOG II over to in the right the center and the red box there that gives us the date it is year 17 Showa it is the month of June and it is day five because his Majesty's warships keep Tokyo time wherever they operate so it's June 5th in Tokyo but it's June 4th local New Midway so this is her Kota Cho show for her morning strike down below in this other yellow box we can see the number of aircraft that she employed we have 18 dive bombers we have a torpedo plane that's used as a recon bird and we also have nine fighters and then down below that in the purple here this linear strip it tells us when the flight operations are actually occurring so Oh 128 is when things kick off again we're on Tokyo time that's Oh for 28 local that's when her morning strike goes off and then the blue box is giving us the ordinance that was expended they tell us 18 number 25 common bombs various machine gun ammo yada yada yada so that is the first page of her koto next slide please if we look a little bit further what we see are the detailed operations for her combat air patrol so down the left-hand we'll see watch number one watch number two watch number three you watch number four in the orange box there we have the names of all the guys that got into the planes we have the times that they took off again her first combat Air Patrol watch took off at oh one twenty eight which is Oh 428 local and there's the ordinance that was expended what I want to point out to you is the purple boxes down here on the bottom which are from watch number five and six and if you click the slide for me please what we have here is these three gentlemen who are recovered on a cog II at 10:00 10:00 in the morning these are guys that have gone up they have shot vt6 to pieces they are out of cannon ammo and they need to come down and be refueled so these planes land on the ACOG II at 10:00 10:00 in the morning which is just 15 minutes before akagi's bombed this entry in her coat Oh show shows blows Fujita's account completely apart it means that it's nonsense because there is no way that I can get my strike force up on deck and ready to go in the 15 minute window of opportunity that this koto says that I have and furthermore next slide please if we then go down in her koto to watch number 9 here you'll see an entry for next slide please a gentleman named petty officer first class Kimura correo who takes off from the acog II at 10:25 in the morning and you recall Fujita's passage in his book that the lead zero was whizzing off the flight deck that's this guy but the koto cho cho makes it absolutely clear that he is not part of a strike force he's not a strike force escort he is a combat air patrol pilot so when we look at the air activities of a cog II and also at the other carriers we come away with the impression that you know what all of those planes that those American pilots saw on the flight deck when they were bombing the Japanese were not strike planes at all they were they were combat air patrol planes and that makes perfect sense because again these were very busy flight decks and we were beating off a constant string of attacks next slide please so Fujita's account in the words of and I actually didn't make this up um when we were doing the research on this book we were confused about what these Koto's told us and I fired off two separate letters to two Japanese historians asking them to clarify what was going on here so far as I knew Fujita was a war hero in Japan and I certainly was not going to be impolite to the man and so I couched this and very you know helped me the dumb historian understand what is going on here fire off the letters letters come back from these two guys one of them responds to understand why Fujita's account is a pack of transparent lies you had shipped ABBA bucks okay so it turns out that Fujita's account had actually been discredited in Japan for the better part of twenty twenty-five years but we had not gotten word over on this side of the pond because and you can understand why because if you're going to figure out why his his account as a pack of transparent lies you've got to have the gumption and to actually go and use the code Oh Joe shows and they're hideous I mean why would you want to do that when you've got this nice neat you know dramatic account in hand that's worked very well for us for the last 50 years so in essence you know the Japanese were nowhere near being ready to attack at ten twenty five they were still at least a half an hour away and they may not have even begun spotting their aircraft at all and again the only aircraft that are on those flight decks are combat air patrol fighters so here is an instance where I would argue that history is fluid and we are constantly reformulating history on the basis of new information that comes to us and even though this is an incredibly important event within the battle it is not above re-examination we have always got to be in a position where we have the intellectual honesty to say to ourselves I want to see what the new sources are I want to see what they have to say so that is I would say one of our better contributions to understanding this particular battle understanding that the in fact were kind of back on their heels as a result of all the attacks coming in and hitting them and really that sort of points out a contribution of VTA to vt6 that is not commonly acknowledged the common wisdom is that they dragged as all the zeros down to two you know sea level and that made it impossible for those zeros to be back up to intercept the dive bomber as well that's not quite true because the zero fighter can climb from sea level to 15,000 feet in five minutes flat VT eight had been destroyed for you know 40 minutes all of its guys were dead how does that prevent the zeros from going back up to stacking altitude really what VT 8 + VG 6 did was to keep Nagumo off balance he could never find that 45 minute window of opportunity that he needed to spot his flight decks and actually hit back against the Americans thank you very much for your time you

Channel: The National WWII Museum

Views: 116,818

Keywords: Jonathan Parshall, Battle of Midway, Pearl Harbor, WWII Conference

Id: 23vL8AvqbDc

Length: 32min 17sec (1937 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 11 2012