THE
ROUNDTABLE FORUM
Official newsletter of the Battle of Midway Roundtable
17 April 2009
Issue
Number: 2009-16
Our 12th Year
~
AROUND THE TABLE ~
MEMBERS’
TOPICS IN THIS ISSUE:
1. Consequences of the BOM
2. What Kido Butai Should Have Done
3. Defending the Atoll
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1. CONSEQUENCES OF THE BOM
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16 March 2009
From: Scott Kair
Illinois
The consequences of the BOM
range from what was immediately obvious to the more subtle, discerned within a
few years (and perhaps not widely circulated), and what was occluded or
unnoticed for decades. Sometimes what
was immediately known initiated a chain of events that led to more subtle
consequences, and some of those consequences have remained hidden until someone
trips over them, or infers them from other discoveries.
A classic example of the latter
is the theory advanced by Mr. Morgenthau, the federal attorney in New York, who
hypothesized that turning back the Japanese at Midway allowed the reallocation of
tank production from deployment on the west coast to shipment to the British in
North Africa. Those tanks, he
theorized, enabled the British to halt Rommel’s advance into Egypt and thence
to the relatively undefended territories of Palestine, Trans-Jordan, and the
oil fields of the Middle East.
Other consequences seem obvious
once supporting information and documents are discovered, often by
accident. Once such instance is that
the BOM seems to have led directly to the cancellation of the USS Montana
class of battleships, with the financial and shipyard resources being
reallocated to building Essex class aircraft carriers.
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2. WHAT KIDO BUTAI SHOULD HAVE DONE ( see issues # 11 , 12 , 13, 14, 15 )
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10 April 2009
From: Barrett Tillman
Arizona
author, Clash of the Carriers, et al
Regarding Jon Parshall's comments on Fuchida:
”The bottom line is that Fuchida was very good at figuring out what
sort of stories his American audiences wanted to hear, and he was cheerful to
pass those along.”
That is a factor that probably cannot be overemphasized. The cultural
aspects in deciphering Japanese testimony arises again and again. It's
been confirmed by a colleague of mine, an American living & working in
Japan, who has interviewed many WW2 veterans. I asked him about
statements in the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey, and he said that in order
to gain a full knowledge of the statement, you need to know who asked the
question and in what context.
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11 April 2009
From: Yohan Lupander
Sweden
author, Midway 1942; Vandpunkten i Stilla havet (Turning
Point in the Pacific)
The U.S. side had a priceless
advantage in Midway as a base for long-range reconnaissance flights with
PBYs that could take off in darkness to arrive in the search areas soon
after sunrise. In the early morning of
June 4th, the PBYs had already put the finishing touch to the decisive U.S.
intelligence victory, with great benefits for the morning battles.
This begs the question: What could Nagumo have done to improve his
situational awareness? That his
reconnaissance flights during the early morning of June 4th were too few and
launched too late has been well documented in Shattered Sword. Japanese doctrine apparently frowned upon
using strike aircraft for reconnaissance if other assets were available,
primarily cruiser and battleship float planes. Both Tone and Chikuma
carried enough planes (two Daves,
three Jakes each) for a
more intense reconnaissance effort than actually took place (which would
still have benefited from augmentation by carrier planes). However, the most critical factor was to
find the enemy as early as possible, which meant that the
Japanese reconnaissance aircraft should, if possible, have been launched
well before dawn. Would this have been
at all possible, given doctrine and the state of training of the pilots?
If TF16/17 had been discovered
by a Japanese reconnaissance flight (and correctly reported) no later than
about 0600, Nagumo would have been able to launch his anti-shipping strike
force before the famous Tomonaga message had had time to cause the
commencement of re-arming. An earlier
discovery would of course have been even more valuable. The respective strike forces may then
well have passed each other on their ways to their targets and would then have
found carriers more or less empty of aircraft, prepared to be attacked. You take it from there.
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Ed note: the IJN search plan at the BOM deserves much
criticism, like Yohan’s above, but we do it with the benefit of hindsight. Actually, the Japanese came to Midway with
no expectation of a sea battle on the first day, and they planned their air
search accordingly. The sea battle was
supposed to have occurred after Midway was occupied, and would have primarily
involved Yamamoto’s BBs and CAs making short work of Hornet and Enterprise
as they dashed out of Pearl Harbor to defend the atoll. (They believed that they’d taken care of Yorktown
in the Coral Sea.) If Nagumo had
actually thought that Hornet and Enterprise were already in the
Midway area, one might assume that many of his decisions, especially his search
plan, would have been dramatically different.
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3. DEFENDING THE ATOLL
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3 April 2009
From: Dan Hamilton
Washington state
I enjoyed the
recent newsletter, especially "what Kido Butai should have
done." If I might express a humble
amateur observation on CDR William A. Eldard's 4th point [see issue 14] that "Midway would not have fallen
without a fight...Considering Midway's ample defenses and the lack of a
Japanese amphibious doctrine, securing the island itself was no sure
thing." According to Mr. Mrazek's A Dawn Like Thunder: "In
most places, the island's water table was only three feet beneath the surface
of the sand. There was no way to dig deep bunkers. After the
Japanese battleships finished shelling the island with fourteen-inch guns,
there wouldn't be a lot of men left." (p. 76).
Absent air
cover and any ability to dig in from prolonged and determined
shelling, wouldn't Midway have been a pushover no matter how
gallantly our Marines would have fought? Wasn't it the Japanese ability
to burrow deeply that made our island hoping so deadly for us?
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Ed. note: this topic is one that has previously seen a lot of print on the
Roundtable, and you can find it discussed in depth in Appendix 5 of Shattered Sword and Chapter 5 of No
Right to Win. But it’s a fair
question for newer members and anyone who doesn’t have those references. Here’s a suggestion for those members: take a look at the Order of Battle lists in
almost any book on the BOM (or click here), spend a
little time noting the assigned missions of the various Japanese fleet
elements, and let us know your thoughts on the defenders’ chances for repulsing
an amphibious invasion of the atoll.
~ NOW
HEAR THIS! ~
NEWS
& INFO IN THIS ISSUE:
- Return to Midway
- Link of the Week
- Editor’s Notes
- Anniversary and Reunion Announcements
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RETURN TO MIDWAY
I apologize to Robert Ballard for co-opting the title of
his fine book and TV documentary for this article, because it’s not about a
book nor a documentary. Instead, this
concerns the Roundtable’s most reviewed full-scale motion picture, Midway (1976),
which is still shown quite frequently on cable and satellite channels,
particularly AMC. From the Roundtable’s
earliest days, our members have repeatedly criticized the film for its many
mismatched ships and aircraft, its factual omissions and distortions, its
mischaracterization of key personnel, and especially for its sappy fictional
sub-plot concerning a VF-3 pilot and his Nisei girlfriend. Since all of that is pretty much an old
story on the Roundtable, there didn’t seem to be much reason for giving this
venerable movie another look.
But last year I upgraded to a decent home-theater/HDTV
installation, with the result that I now find myself watching a lot of stuff
that I’d otherwise ignore. When Midway
showed up on the AMC schedule yet again last week, I thought, why
not? I knew the special effects
were good, despite the mismatches, so at least I’d get to experience the film
in a way that I hadn’t since seeing it in the theater 33 years ago.
But as those B-25s cranked up during the opening credits
(in awesome surround-sound), I had a quick thought—rather than grit my teeth
for the next three hours because of all the errors I knew were coming, why not
make a diligent effort to note those things that the movie actually got right? There must be something.
Indeed, there was.
It was an interesting exercise: deliberately ignore all those
much-discussed annoyances—like unarmed Vindicators masquerading as TBDs, or Hal
Holbrook butchering the character of Joseph Rochefort—and instead maintain
sharp focus on anything that might actually merit the producers a BZ or
two. With that mindset, I was surprised
to find that Midway actually had a lot to like. Here are some examples:
1. Yamamoto’s aide
declares that because of the Doolittle raid, “there will be no more
footdragging by the General Staff. Now
they’ll have to approve your Midway operation.” A minor but important historical point.
2. Rochefort, in
pressing his opinion that “AF” stood for Midway, pointed out that “last March a
Japanese scout plane radio’d a report to its headquarters concerning conditions
around ‘AF.’ We checked its position
against all nearby land masses, and the only thing it could have been was
Midway.” This key detail is usually
missing from the history books, but here the time frame and circumstances are
accurately described as to when Station Cast on Corregidor gave the Navy’s
intel community its first solid indicator of the meaning of AF. I saw that as a very positive element in a
production that is otherwise rife with negatives.
3. Yamamoto, in
counting the likely U.S. carriers that might sortie from Pearl Harbor, tells
Nagumo that “you will have a two-to-one numerical superiority in
carriers.” Another fine point of detail
that the producers got right without explaining anything to the audience—the
Japanese thought that the Yorktown had been critically disabled at Coral
Sea, leaving no more than two operational American carriers in the
Pacific. Hence, Yamamato figured that
his four carriers against not more then two of the enemy’s was more than
enough—a 2:1 advantage.
4. In arguing the
possibility that Rochefort’s radio intercepts might be an elaborate Japanese
ruse, Washington hatchet-man Captain Maddox (James Coburn) cites the extensive
radio deception transmissions sent by Japanese shore stations in advance of the
Pearl Harbor attack—another minor but important historical point that the movie
producers not only got right, but did better than any number of Pearl Harbor
revisionists.
5. As bad as Holbrook
was in portraying Rochefort, the choice of Glenn Ford as Spruance was
excellent. Ford in 1976 displayed a
remarkable physical resemblance to Spruance in 1942, and he’d apparently
studied his character well, convincingly portraying the admiral’s cautious
confidence.
6. The script
accurately set up the circumstances facing Fletcher at the start of the battle
by a verbatim reading of Admiral Nimitz’s “calculated risk” letter that
accompanied CINCPAC Op Plan 29-42.
7. SBD pilot Sam
Adams of VS-5 is properly identified by name and squadron as having found the Hiryu
on the afternoon of June 4th. I
thought this to be another example of a fine point of historical detail that
the producers could easily have ignored or fictionalized.
8. And finally, while
this isn’t exactly an example of accuracy in the script, it’s still worthy of
positive mention: whenever you see a
radioman tapping out a message with his telegraph key in movies like this, the
producers usually insert some sort of nondescript dot-dash noise in the
background to simulate what is supposedly being sent. In the scene where a frustrated Nagumo is demanding to know what
ship types the Tone 4 scout has spotted, he orders an Akagi
radioman to send such an inquiry. We
then hear in the background, in easily readable Morse: “IDENTIFY SHIPS” —in plain language
English! But why not? All of the Japanese dialogue in the film was
also in English. I initially found
this brief passage amusing, but upon reflection, they’d actually handled that
particular scenario far better than most other Hollywood productions.
When it was over, I found that I’d enjoyed watching Midway
again, a bet that I’d never have taken beforehand. Knowing the film’s failings in advance and
deciding to ignore them enabled me to focus on the positives, with the result
that I found a lot of them, like the above, that I never knew were there. (But I have to admit that I fast-forwarded
through all of that Nisei girlfriend nonsense.) —RR
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LINK OF THE WEEK
Here’s a web page that
many of you will probably want to mark as a Favorite or Bookmark in your
browser. Back in the Roundtable’s
earliest days (in the last century, in fact), Chris Hawkinson put together a
web site that is still one of the best references you can find for certain
information about the battle. This site
and its linked pages are among those that I refer to the most, for they include
the names of every pilot and radioman/gunner assigned to every squadron aboard
the three U.S. carriers at Midway.
Similar data is included for aircraft based on the atoll.
As you can imagine,
it’s a primary resource whenever I’m asked to identify someone’s uncle,
grandfather, etc. who is said to have been an aircrew veteran of the BOM. (Conversely, it was also a major aid in
dealing with the regrettable topic found in chapter 15 of No Right to Win.) The pages also include most of the Navy
Bureau of Aeronautics numbers (or Army Air Forces serial numbers) for U.S.
aircraft present at the BOM.
Click here
for the link of the week
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EDITOR’S NOTES
~ If you’ve ever
wanted to know exactly which actor was playing which character in Midway (1976),
click here
for the full cast list.
~ For some reason,
the International Midway Memorial Foundation web site is now shown as expired. I’m unaware of the organization’s status,
and for that reason I’ve removed their scheduled BOM seminar in Washington, DC
from the list below. If anyone has
information on the IMMF or its June 4th seminar, please pass the word.
~ I’ve also removed
the BOM listing for the Pacific War Museum (Nimitz museum) at Fredericksburg,
TX, which has apparently canceled the commemoration they previously announced
for June 5th. No BOM events appear on their
current schedule.
~ On a somewhat
personal note, I will be participating in the Coral Sea/BOM seminar and air
show at Chino, CA (east of Los Angeles), on June 6th. It would be great to meet any Roundtable members who might also
attend. Find me at the seminar,
scheduled for 10:00 AM. (The hosts
there are still seeking additional vets, historians, authors, etc. for the
panel.) —RR
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2009 BOM ANNIVERSARY AND UNIT REUNION ANNOUNCEMENTS
The organizers for the BOM commemorations at Pearl Harbor,
Houston, and Chino are seeking BOM veterans, historians, authors, etc. who
might be willing to serve as panelists or otherwise as participants. Additionally, BOM vets are especially
welcome as honored guests at any of the commemoration events. Contact the editor
for info on any event listed below.
1. 26 May, Phoenix, AZ, BOM commemoration by
NRA & NOUS
2. 31 May-5 June, Pearl
Harbor, BOM symposium plus Midway tour
3. 3 June,
Arlington, VA: formal banquet,
Army-Navy Country Club
4. 4 June,
Washington D.C.: USN commemoration at
the Navy Memorial
5. 4 June, Houston,
TX: BOM commemoration by NOUS
6. 4-7 June, New
Orleans, LA: USS Yorktown (CV-5)
reunion
7. 6 June, Chino, CA: Coral Sea & BOM symposium and air show
8. 6 June, San
Diego, CA: BOM commemoration aboard USS
MIdway.
9. 6 June, San
Francisco, CA: formal banquet, Marines
Memorial Club
10. 6 June,
Jacksonville, FL: BOM commemoration
& banquet hosted by Navy League
11. 10-12 September, Branson, MO: VF-42 reunion
If you have any information on
these or similar events, please pass the word.
For a glossary of abbreviations, acronyms, and terms used in The
Roundtable Forum, click here
or go to our home page and click "The Roundtable Glossary" link.
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Roundtable Forum, the Official Newsletter of the Battle of Midway Roundtable is
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