Why Did Japanese Intelligence Fail at Midway?

the US Navy won the Battle of Midway primarily because they were able to surprise the Japanese fleet but this raises the question why was there such a colossal intelligence failure that left Japan in the dark we'll tackle this from the strategic to the tactical level the strategic level involving code-breaking and the tactical level involving scouting but first I wanted to give a shout out to the armchair historian website which is quickly becoming the home of many history youtubers such as myself who are uploading ad-free content without the shackles of this very platform you can get access today and receive one month free with the second 85% off by using the promo code Invicta 85 in the link in the description below so on the strategic level this will involve the intelligence war between the encoders and the code breakers when it comes to this arms race between the u.s. and Japan it had been going on for quite a few years back in the 1920s for instance the u.s. realized Japan was a potential adversary and began working to break their military and diplomatic codes and cyphers special groups like the Black Chamber had huge success which gave America a leg up during the interwar years such as in the Washington Naval Treaty negotiations however once word got out of the intelligence breach the Japanese took serious efforts to improve their security which resulted in the deployment of the red and later the purple cipher machines how these worked is absolutely fascinating and I suggest you read up on it further if you're interested but in brief given the sophistication of these devices the Japanese justifiably thought them unbreakable just as the Germans did with their famous enigma however skilled American code breakers were able to decrypt them by December 6th 1941 in doing so they actually got wind of the imminent outbreak of war but this failed to materialize in the form of any response at Pearl Harbor Japan then managed to pull off their sneak attack and were therefore reinforced in the belief that their communications were indeed secure and to some extent this was true while the purple ciphers may have been decrypted there were still many communications protected by code cryptography so a simple version of this code might be that a set of given numbers corresponds to a word or phrase much like a dictionary multiple code books could be used to make things even more complicated additive books for instance provided an indicator you could look up that tells you how to shift that original set of numbers to achieve a new set add on top of that yet more techniques and the fact that these were frequently updated you get a sense of the level of difficulty involved here and Japan had many codes the most secure of which was the Japanese naval code jn-25 this would have a ton of layered security that gave the Japanese great confidence in their secrecy and it was only thanks to the incredible work of American code breakers like row shirts team at station hypo that the u.s. gained enough information to act decisively at Midway as for why Japan was not able to do the same well they did with some codes but just not with the most important ones for which the u.s. owes a huge debt of gratitude to the Navajo code talkers that made it incredibly hard for anyone to crack their code generally how this worked was that if you wanted to send a message you would start with the first English letter then use a code book to turn that letter into an English word then you would translate that English word into the equivalent Navajo word and that is what you would send and the jump in language here has the distinct advantage of not showing the same type of manipulation fingerprint that numerical translations do especially if you don't have access to anyone who speaks the language in question so yeah that's why the Japanese intelligence failed on the larger strategic scale now let's turn to the tactical aspect at the end of the day intelligence gathered ahead of time is great but always comes with a degree of uncertainty that will be made worse by the inevitable chaos of war therefore militaries often take many precautions to have multiple ways to pierce the fog of war when it comes to the planned attack on Midway Japan had three major ways of doing so the first involved a mission that would rekon etre Pearl Harbor to confirm that the US carriers were still there this would have been achieved by sea planes that would be refueled during the long journey by submarines however the US was aware of the possible rendezvous point near the French frigate Shoals and increased their security when the Japanese submarine arrived it found the area mined and two warships guarding the area the mission was therefore canceled and Japan left in the dark regarding American carrier activity the second effort involved the deployment of a submarine picket line east of Midway meant to ambush the u.s. fleet once they rushed into the trap however the Japanese submarines were actually delayed in their assembly which allowed the US carriers to slip by undetected on their way to the northern point luck this in and of itself was pretty bad but what was worse was that the Japanese High Command was unaware of the delay and thus falsely believed that their flank was secured the third effort involved the launching of recon planes ahead of the carrier task force theoretically this would be able to detect forces stationed on the flanks however the Japanese fleet dedicated only seven planes to cover an incredibly large area which was suffering from adverse weather conditions that limited visibility the search pattern therefore had many holes in it which could have been covered by the deployment of more planes a possible motivation against doing so was the desire to reserve as much air power as possible for the strike on Midway and the u.s. fleet as well as the mistaken idea that the flank was already secured by the picket line of submarines which was not the case this Cavalier decision cost the Japanese dearly and is heavily criticized by many historians the Japanese were so stung by the damage of this oversight that they later introduced to phase scouting into their doctrine to mitigate the risk of future surprises so yeah then about covers the main reasons why the Japanese intelligence failed at Midway and opened the door of opportunity to the Americans who frankly stumbled through it to victory in large part due to sheer dumb luck it's not an elegant picture of naval strategy but so goes war and after all is the ancient Latin proverb States fortune favors the bold if you're enjoying my naval history content definitely check out these videos where I visit the u.s. Naval War College as well as the aircraft carrier the USS Hornet as we learned together about the past and about naval history a huge thanks again to all our supporters on patreon for making this video possible please consider contributing to make my continued documentary efforts a reality and if you would like to see more of my type of content definitely like subscribe and check out these videos which will be of interest to you I've been doing a lot of content on Midway including an overall discussion of the Battle of Midway which I suggest you check out as well as my review of Midway and all sorts of other stuff on wargaming and a whole variety of other content so yeah I hope you guys enjoyed and I will see you in the next one

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Views: 274,981

Keywords: midway, midway movie, 2019, battle of midway, america, japan, navy, fleet, pacific theater, trailer, trailer 2, new trailer, battle of midway trailer, battle of midway documentary, battle of midway japanese perspective, midway review, midway battle, us navy, battle of the coral sea, pearl harbor, midway 2019 trailer, midway 2019 movie, japanese intelligence, fail, failure, navajo, navajo code talkers

Id: cOQD4_ZKTKI

Length: 7min 46sec (466 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 16 2019