Did the Battle of Midway decide the Second World War?
At 9.20am on June 4 1942, an air group of Dauntless divebombers, led by Lieutenant Commander Clarence “Wade” McClusky, arrived at a point in the Pacific Ocean, west of the US island of Midway, where they expected to find a Japanese battle group of four aircraft carriers. Instead they found the sea “empty”. McClusky then made a critical decision. “Instead of turning back,” write Brendan Simms and Steven McGregor, “as his dwindling fuel gauges suggested he should, he decided to fly west and then northwest. This was not, as was often claimed, guesswork or a mere hunch on his part. McClusky knew where the Japanese were.”
Moments later, the clouds opened beneath McClusky to reveal the Japanese fleet. Ordering his men to attack, he led them in a thrilling dive manoeuvre they had practised many times. To one observer, the descending dive-bombers, with the sun reflecting from their wing-tips, looked like a “silver waterfall”, hence the title of this new book. It was a key moment in the naval Battle of Midway, often regarded as one of the turning points of the Pacific War. Yet, the authors stress, although good fortune played its part, the main reasons for the American victory were “superior training and technology”. It was “not inevitable”, but “neither was it accidental”.
The battle took place barely six months after the devastating Japanese attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor that brought America into the war. In that time, Japanese forces had enjoyed an almost unbroken string of military successes in the Far East, capturing Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines and the US possessions of Guam and Wake Island.
The attack on Midway in early June involved a huge Japanese naval force of four aircraft carriers and 11 battleships, and many smaller warships. Their intention was to turn Midway Island into an air base from which they could have rendered Pearl Harbor untenable. If successful, the campaign would probably have led to the occupation of Hawaii and attacks on the US mainland.
To defend Midway, the Americans had just three aircraft carriers – including one hastily repaired after damage in another naval battle – and no battleships. Yet they prevailed because they knew, from intercepted signals, that the Japanese attack was coming; they possessed the matchless and deadly Dauntless dive-bomber; and they were able to use the runway on Midway Island as a “fourth carrier”.
As if to underline the importance of the Dauntless and its use, the authors devote sections of the book to its inventor, the German-American Ed Heinemann; to Chester Nimitz, the military commander who puts the planes in the right place at the right time; and to one of the chief pilots, Dusty Kleiss, whose intense training prepared him for the day that would define his life. “Without the skill he and his comrades demonstrated that day,” write the authors, “all the technological wizardry and strategic acumen in the world would have been to no avail.”
The moment that McClusky, Kleiss and the other pilots attacked the Japanese carriers on June 4 is thrillingly told. Before swooping down, Kleiss snorted ephedrine spray to clear his nasal passages “so that the rapid loss in pressure would not burst his eardrums”. Then he rocked his wings, signalling to his men that he was about to dive, and finally pushed his control stick forward and accelerated to 240 knots. The bombs he released at 1,500 feet – 1,000 feet lower than the recommended minimum height – struck the flight deck of the carrier Kaga and exploded in its bowels, causing a fireball that could be seen for miles.
Similar attacks were made on the other three Japanese carriers. Though only one in five bombs struck home, they were enough to sink all four ships. “It seemed unbelievable,” wrote a Japanese eye-witness. “In seconds our invincible carrier force had become shattered wrecks.”
A brave Japanese counter-attack by dive bombers and torpedo planes was able to cripple and ultimately sink the US carrier Yorktown. But this was the only blemish on an extraordinary American victory. Its significance, say the authors, is that June 4 marked the “high point of Japan’s World War II expansion”. This is inaccurate. As eminent historian Richard B Frank has pointed out, the “Japanese remained on the offensive in the Southeast Asia area in the summer of 1942”, and it was actually Japan’s defeat in the five-month-long air-sea-land battle of Guadalcanal that marked the real turning point in the Pacific.
Midway was still a hugely significant battle, but not one that decided the war in the Pacific. “Even if Japan had won the battle,” write the authors, “the sheer economic might of the United
‘In seconds our invincible carrier force had become shattered wrecks,’ wrote a Japanese eye-witness
States would have eventually told against her.” It’s a pretty accurate, if unromantic, conclusion to a gripping and original narrative that deploys both American and Japanese sources to considerable effect. The authors are an odd couple: Simms a professor of international relations at Cambridge, and McGregor a US paratrooper turned historian. But they’ve combined effectively to produce the best account of the battle I’ve read: short, cleverly structured and well-written.
Midway matters, they insist, because it reminds us – at a time of rising tension in the Pacific – that wars are won not on the battlefield but by building up military capability beforehand. “Machiavelli’s lesson,” they write, “was that good princes prepare. In times of peace, they set to work, hoping not to avoid danger entirely, but to mitigate it.”