Speeches on the Battle of Midway

Professor Geoffrey Till (biography), "Commemorating Midway," Midway Night Talk, 2005

"The end of May and the beginning of June seems to be a good time to have major battles at sea. In 1794, after capturing six French line of battleships and sinking another the British called their battle the Glorious First of June after the date because there was no nearby land to use as a reference. The Battle of Tsushima between the Japanese and the Russians took place on 27 May 1904, the Battle of Jutland between the British and the Germans was on 31st May 1916 and so on. The Battle of Trafalgar, I must admit, only happened on October 21 1805 but I need to mention that if only because this year commemorating its 200th anniversary is at the heart of our "Sea Britain" celebrations this year.

In some of the intended re-stagings of the battle there is some talk about re-christening the two sides -- there's may need to be a "red" fleet and a "blue" fleet rather than a British and a French and Spanish fleet. This isn't just political correctness gone mad, nor is it a cunning plan to win the French over to Britain's keeping its budget rebate from the EU [European Union], it's because even 200 years after the event, battles like this are still iconic: they seem to matter to people and how they feel about the world. Every nation needs its heroes, and many of them need their great naval victories too.

This was certainly the case in the 20th Century. Admiral Togo's victory at Tsushima was clearly in Yamamoto's mind when the Combined Fleet sailed from Kure on Tsushima or Navy day, 27th May. Just a coincidence? I think not. It should be remembered that Yamamoto was at Tsushima, was badly wounded in the leg and lost 2 fingers of his left hand there. "When the shells began to fall above me," he said, "I found I was not afraid."¹ Likewise, Admiral Nimitz talked with Togo shortly after the battle, insisted on attending his funeral in 1927 and played a leading part in the re-establishment of Togo's shrine in Tokyo after the Second World War. As for Togo, himself, he clearly had Nelson in mind when he signalled the fleet "The existence of our Imperial country rests on this one action. Every many of you must do his utmost." And Togo's battle-flag flew again from the carrier Akagi for the attack on Pearl Harbor 36 years later.

All in all, its hard to avoid the conclusion that for professional sailors, preparing for, and pursuing, the glorious and decisive battle was what naval warfare and maritime strategy was basically all about. It's a central part of the naval faith.

But what, exactly, is a decisive battle? You could say that it was decisive in that it "decided" the outcome of a war on land. Or it decided the outcome of a war at sea. Obviously, there is plenty of room for interpretation here -- usually the degree of decisiveness lies in the eye of the beholder.

Certainly the decisiveness, and indeed the very character, of a battle may appear very different to the historian in the comfort and safety of retrospection, than it does to the participant for whom it might well have been a life changing or indeed a life-ending event. Even for the participants, the battle may have seemed very diverse. Their outlook and their interpretation of events will usually depend on who they were, where they were and what they were doing.

In historical circles, indeed, there is something of a vogue for the kind of history that seeks to tell later generations "what it was like to be there" - to recapture, if you will, the experience of battles like Trafalgar, Tsushima or Midway.² What such books reveal, however, is that there is no such thing as the experience of Midway -- instead we have experiences, in the plural, that reflect the manifold viewpoints of the participants. Battle is an intensely private affair that often has huge consequences for them too.

These days, however, the notion of decisive battle has become rather unfashionable, in some circles at least. It is thought misleading, simplistic, sometimes dangerous. Some argue, for example that this preoccupation takes sailors minds off other things that need doing, possibly more urgently. Here, the argument goes, that by focussing so much on getting the ready for the Battle of Jutland, the Royal Navy took its eye off the hum-drum business of protecting shipping against the U-boat. These days, too, there are many other things that navies and indeed military forces generally, need to be doing apart from fighting battles. Perhaps especially in regard to current events, we may need to be reminded of Napoleon's observation: "To conquer is easy, to occupy hard -- to conquer is nothing, one must profit from one's success." It has led to widespread fears that some of us in the West are so absorbed by the need to win battles that we are neglecting the need to win the peace afterwards as well -- even though this, the end-state, is what should justify the whole business in the first place. ³

Decisive battles are also out of favour because all too often they aren't decisive -- in the sense that even great victories don't necessarily decide the outcome of conflict at sea, let alone on land. Trafalgar, surely the archetype of devastating naval victory in that Nelson destroyed two-thirds of the Allied battlefleet didn't end the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon reversed its strategic effect a few weeks later at Austerlitz and the war carried on for another decade.

Even at sea, the French were able to conduct a dangerous and ferocious war on trade and to compete with the British in a score of minor naval campaigns around the world. They also managed in effect to reconstruct their battlefleet. By 1813, Napoleon had another 80 line of battleships in commission. In the twelve years before Trafalgar the British lost 87 warships to the French; in the 10 years afterwards they lost another 61.⁴ Arguably, Jutland actually made things worse for the British, because the Germans effectively abandoned their battlefleet pretensions and focussed instead on the U-boats which were turned out to be much more dangerous.

But problems in achieving decisiveness also derive from the increasing scale of naval warfare, especially in the 20th Century. At Tsushima, the Japanese sank such a high proportion of the Russian fleet that there was virtually nothing left over to fight another day, and, in the time available, the Russians couldn't hope to replace their losses. But this was very unusual. The British strategists Sir Julian Corbett called it "perhaps the most decisive and complete naval victory in history--not in our most successful war had we obtained a command of the sea so nearly absolute as that which Japan now enjoys."⁵ He wondered whether anyone would ever have such uncontrolled sway ever again. Normally, only a proportion of the adversaries' main fleets encounter each other in battle. The grander the physical scale of the war the more likely is it that fleets will be dispersed rather than concentrated, divided geographically and intent on different tasks in different areas. The usual pattern therefore is not of the single decisive battle, but of a sequence of more or less indecisive battles than become decisive over a period when their results are added together. This is the reason why in the 20th Century we discovered the key, so-called "operational" level of war, where the focus was on winning campaigns through the delivery of a beneficially cumulative sequence of battles. Against this criteria, it is perhaps hard to conceive of any single battle in a monumental conflict like the Second World War being decisive.

So, against all this, how does Midway stack up?

In terms of losses there can surely be no argument. The Japanese lost 4 fleet carriers, some two thirds of their air striking force, about 250 aircraft together with a large number of irreplaceable aircrew, and two heavy cruisers. More important perhaps, they lost their aura of invincibility. For all these reasons Nimitz claimed it 'as the greatest battle since Jutland'.⁶

But there's danger here. After Jutland, one British Admiral complained that the Press were inclined to score the Battle as though it were a cricket match. But victory is better defined not by ships lost or captured but by what it makes possible.⁷ The point is what happens afterwards that is the issue.

Midway was not 'decisive' in the sense that everything after it was plain sailing. Four months later during the ghastly Solomons campaign, Nimitz summed it all up on October 15th 1942: "We are unable to control the sea. The situation is not hopeless, but it is certainly critical..."⁸ Partly because this was a different kind of close-quarter war in the narrow seas of the Slot, often at night, partly because even after Midway the correlation of naval air and Marine forces between the Japanese and the allies that were relevant to the situation was still dangerously close. The result was a gruelling series of perhaps 50 closely fought surface and air skirmishes and battles in support of the marines on Guadalcanal. Arguably it was the naval battle of Guadalcanal, Nov 11-15th that really decided the issue of the Solomons campaign. "It would seem," said Roosevelt that the turning point in this war has at last been reached."⁹ Which implies, of course, that Midway wasn't the turning point -- it was 'merely' a part of a cumulative sequence of operations that started in the Coral Sea and ended in the Slot.¹⁰

Together, the effect of this campaign was fundamentally to change the nature of the war in the Pacific. At Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal Japan's forwards movement out to a defensive perimeter that they might be able to hold against the returning allies was stopped. The captured papers of one Japanese officer contain the perceptive and prophetic comment:

...the success or failure in recapturing Guadalcanal Island and the vital naval battle related to it, is the fork in the road which leads to victory for them or for us.¹¹

Even more substantially, and as Yamamoto himself pointed out, the United States was hugely superior in industrial resources. Once these were effectively mobilised, the Japanese would find themselves confronting a military industrial power that would out-produce any losses in military materiel the Japanese could inflict and which would dwarf Japan's own productive capacity. For every one major warship the Japanese built after Midway, the Americans built 16. The Japanese built another 7 carriers before the war ended, the Americans over 100. The Americans produced 300,000 aircraft by August 1945, the Japanese rarely managed 12,000 a year, and the quality of those aircraft and the skill of the people flying them dropped off hugely -- so much so that the Japanese logically concluded that since they were unlikely to return from their missions anyway, they might as well be turned into kamikaze pilots. In this calculus, the Japanese were bound to lose in the end. To quote Winston Churchill on the later stages of the battle of the Atlantic, "All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force."¹³

What was basically at issue, it could be argued, were two styles of war, as exemplified perhaps by the nature of the key decision-makers on both sides at the strategic and operational level. On the American side, there was the relentless Admiral King arguing for a Pacific first priority and the cool rationalism of Admirals Nimitz and Spruance. On the Japanese side, by strong contrast, operational policy emerged from a miasma of compromises and unquestioned assumptions. In Japanese planning, a key role was played by Captain Kameto Kuroshima, the so-called 'God of Operations' who produced his plans after long sessions meditating naked in his cabin, drinking heavily, chain-smoking and burning incense. His inspirational role was very much in the tradition of the medieval warrior-monk Musashi. He never washed, perhaps unsurprisingly never married but exerted a tremendous mystic influence over later generations of Japanese, including Yamamoto himself. Musashi derived his concept of strategy from his sword-fighting expertise in one-on-one duels; perhaps it was partly because of this and their general reverence for the man that the Japanese tended to treat the concepts of war, campaign, battle and victory as though they all meant the same thing. It was a style of war beyond Western concepts of good sense, and surely it was bound to fail?¹⁴

The result of all this has been described by one perceptive analyst in these words: "The US Navy regarded men and machines as interchangeable parts and battle as a managerial exercise, to be embarked upon with a strict eye on profit and loss, while the Japanese saw it as an art form in which will and élan were the decisive elements."¹⁵ Putting this all together, the conclusion seems inescapable. Midway merely accelerated a process that was inevitable, and so hardly counts as a war-changing event.

But this approach is surely overdrawn, for war is not simply a matter of profit and loss, of industrial superiority and of more efficient decision-making systems. All history suggests that those who think of victory as achieved simply through the accumulation of overwhelming superiority in numbers and weaponry are often shown to be mistaken. After all, both at Trafalgar and Midway, the strongest side on paper actually lost.¹⁶

Of course this can be explained by such factors as better training, intelligence and luck but there is also another crucial human, political and moral dimension to it all. Part of it derives from the all-important political context in which such conflicts take place. One of my predecessors at this event, for example, made the interesting observation that Midway was indeed a decisive event for without it, Roosevelt would have found it impossible to hold the line against those who wanted a reversal of priorities between the European and the Pacific theatres of war. A success at Midway was necessary in order to satisfy the American public's need for retribution for Pearl Harbor. Without it, and still more after a defeat at Midway, the American contribution to the war in Europe, and indeed in the Atlantic, would have to have been reduced in scale and delayed in time -- with enormous if incalculable consequences for the future. Midway, in short, was a necessary victory. Losing it could have been decisive in ways impossible to predict, but for moral and political reasons not that closely related to the materiel situation before and after.¹⁷

Finally, victories do not always go the side with the largest forces or the best weaponry. And, in fact Midway was not won by the superior side from either point of view. It was 3 American carriers against 4 Japanese and the odds would have been even worse had the Japanese disposed their forces more wisely. What mattered, at the successive decisive points of the battle, was the individual skill, the fighting determination of people and the straight-forward self-sacrificing heroism of people like Lieutenant Commander John Waldron leading his squadron of Devastators from the Hornet or Ensign Albert Earnest who got his aircraft home with his turret gunner dead, his radioman unconscious his controls wrecked and over 70 hits on his aircraft. The sum of actions like this produced not only narrow tactical and operational results in terms of ships sunk and aircraft shot down, but achieved a crucial, moral effect for the United States and its allies.

To summarise, we should not commemorate the undoubted victory Midway merely as a single battle, important in itself. Nor should we base our view on Midway simply on a comparison of ships sunk or aircraft shot down on both sides. Nor, even, should we remember the battle as what was in effect the US Navy's first ever large scale fleet engagement, important though that was. Instead we should recognise Midway as an inspiring symbol of a decisive campaign that started in the Coral Sea and ended at Guadalcanal. And so when we remember the brave men who served at Midway, we should also remember the equally brave ones who went before and came after them in that grand and war-reversing campaign."

Sources:

[1] Quoted in Alan Schom, The Eagle and the Rising Sun (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 143, 166, 171.

[2] For excellent accounts of Trafalgar and Jutland from this point of view see the recent Roy Adkins, Trafalgar: The Biography of a Battle (London: Abacus, 2004), and Nigel Steel and Peter Hart, Jutland 1916: Death in the Great Wastes (London: Cassell, 2003). Midway deserves no less.

[3] In the light of post-campaign events in Iraq, Osmar White's Conqueror's Road: An Eyewitness Report of Germany 1945 (recently reprinted by the Cambridge University Press, 2003) is instructive.

[4] Jan Breemer, The Burden of Trafalgar: Decisive Battle and Naval Strategic Expectations on the Eve of the First World War (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1993), 27; Richard Woodman, The Victory of Seapower: Winning the Napoleonic War 1806-1814 (London: Chatham Publishing, 1998).

[5] J. S. Corbett, with Rear Admiral Sir Edmonde Slade, Maritime Operations in the Russo-Japanese War 1904-5, Vol. II (Admiralty Staff Intelligence Division, 1915), 332-33, 344.

[6] Quoted, Hugh Bicheno, Midway (London: Cassell, 2001), 182.

[7] Rear Admiral Trevelyan Napier, Letter of June 5, 1916, in my possession. See my "Letters from the First World War," Mariner's Mirror, July 1977, 285-92.

[8] Quoted, Schom, op cit, 386.

[9] Ibid, 428.

[10] This is the argument in Charles W. Koburger, Pacific Turning Point: The Solomons Campaign, 1942-3 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995).

[11] Quoted in John Costello, The Pacific War, 1941-1945 (London: Collins, 1981), 372.

[12] Quoted in H. P. Willmott, The Second World War in the Far East (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 1999), 134.

[13] Victor Davis Hanson, Culture and Carnage (New York: Random House, 2001), 341; Churchill quoted in John Terraine, Business in Great Waters (London: Leo Cooper, 1989), 402.

[14] Bicheno, op cit, 67-68.

[15] Ibid, 117, and also Hanson, op cit, 356ff.

[16] Jutland is a particularly interesting case. The British had the larger forces and lost more than the Germans. However, there is little doubt that they won at the strategic level. See my Seapower: A Guide for the 21st Century (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 164-65, for a rehearsal of the arguments. Tsushima on the other hand was won by a side clearly superior in all respects.

[17] James R. Schlesinger, speech available at http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq81-12..htm.

11 May 2006