Miracle at Midway Review

Midway: The Turning Point of the Pacific War

On December 7, 1941, six Japanese carriers lurking some 200 miles north of Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands launched two waves of planes - 353 in all - in a daring and brilliantly-planned surprise attack against American military installations on the island.  Their goal: to knock out as much of the United States Pacific Fleet and American air power in the Central Pacific to protect the eastern flanks of Japan's lightning invasion of American, British, Dutch, and even Australian territories in Asia and the South Pacific.  With the threat of an American naval counterattack either reduced or removed entirely, the Japanese strategists thought, the Empire of the Sun could grab the resources-rich "Southern Area" (including modern-day Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Burma/Myanmar) and negotiate with the battle-shocked Americans from a position of strength before America's industrial and military might could be brought to bear.

By the time the attack on Pearl Harbor ended, over 2,400 American servicemen and civilians were dead, hundreds more were wounded, and all the battleships moored in the anchorage were either sunk or damaged, as well as several smaller warships and auxilliary vessels. American airpower on Oahu - including Army, Navy and Marine Corps planes - was similarly decimated, with many aircraft caught on the ground and all lined up to better protect them from saboteurs.

Less than six months later, four of the six carriers which had launched this devastating raid and one cruiser of the Imperial Japanese Navy lay at the bottom of the Pacific, along with hundreds of aircraft and - more important - their skilled aircrews after the Battle of Midway.  In perhaps one of the most dramatic reversals of military fortune, the Japanese Navy which had had a six-month-long string of victories was handed its first defeat in over 350 years. 

The Battle of Midway (June 4-6, 1942) is considered to be the turning point of World War II in the Pacific by most (but not all) historians.  It marked the end of Japan's expansion outward and prevented further attempts to attack Hawaii or the West Coast of the U.S. mainland, and though it was a defensive victory for the Americans, it paved the way for Allied offensives in the Central and South Pacific, starting with the landings on Guadalcanal two months later.

Perhaps more significantly, the Battle of Midway could be seen by some, even today, as the ultimate payback for Japan's "dastardly attack" on Pearl Harbor.  So many of the participants - on both sides - were directly or indirectly involved in both events, and the irony is that Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, planned both Operation Hawaii and Operation MI and practically forced his superiors in the Naval General Staff to approve them.  Both were daring and very complicated missions, yet one (Pearl Harbor) was a stunning success, while the other (Midway) was a stunning defeat. 

"Not the least doubt about a victory...."

Although three-fifths of the books co-written by the late Gordon W. Prange with his collaborators Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon deal exclusively with the Pearl Harbor attack and its consequences, Miracle at Midway fits into the literary scheme of things because Operation MI was, in away, a continuation of Yamamoto's strategy of keeping the Pacific Fleet away from Japan's new holdings long enough for his political masters in Tokyo to negotiate with a war-weary United States, which was focusing its military efforts against Germany and Italy, then Japan's allies. 

What Yamamoto was proposing was a variation on the Japanese "Great All-Out Battle" plan that involved luring the Americans out into deep Pacific waters and destroying what was left of the Pacific Fleet - especially America's precious aircraft carriers - in a single decisive blow.

Fittingly for a book touted as "the best-selling sequel to At Dawn We Slept," Miracle at Midway begins with the return of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo's Pearl Harbor Striking Force to Japan and the intensely celebratory mood of that Pacific nation over its victories against Britain and America. 

In stark contrast, the authors describe the mood in the United States in the days and weeks that followed Pearl Harbor as being filled with anger and a strong desire to strike back at the Japanese.

Nothing  would have pleased the American public more than to do just that. The question was how to do it.  With what?  Thus it came about that the immediate post-Pearl Harbor period was unique in the American experience.  A brief echo of it sounded in the 1980 hostage crisis with Iran. But in volume and intensity, that incident cannot truly compare with those few months following Pearl Harbor, when most of the nation's able-bodied young men were pawns in a game where the enemy seemingly ruled the board.  To the explosion of outrage over Pearl Harbor were soon added furious frustration and impatient shame at the apparent impotence of the U.S. armed forces.

"One touch of an armored sleeve...."

And for five months or so, furious frustration and impatient shame seemed to be the prevailing moods of John and Jane Q. Public as Japan's flag of the rising sun fluttered over such locales as Guam, Wake Island, Hong Kong, Manila, Singapore, Rabaul, Bataan, and Corregidor.  American moviegoers and newspaper readers could watch newsreels and read articles describing an unimaginable string of Japanese victories across Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean. 

And yet, within that string of Japanese victories lay the seeds of the Empire's ultimate undoing.  Even from Day One of the Pacific War the Japanese had erred by not following up the Pearl Harbor strike with other raids to destroy the fuel storage tanks and the vital repair facilities needed to keep the U.S. fleet in fighting form.  They also hadn't sunk all of the carriers of Adm. Chester W. Nimitz's Pacific Fleet;  the Saratoga and Yorktown were damaged seriously in the early stages of the war, but up to the Battle of the Coral Sea, where USS Lexington was sunk, the striking force of the Pacific Fleet eluded outright destruction by Japanese air and naval attacks.

Perhaps more relevant to the story of Midway was the psychological sense of superiority felt by the Japanese prior to the battle.  This "victory disease" - a combination of overconfidence and a disdain for the enemy - contributed greatly to the debacle which resulted when Yamamoto decreed that "we should occupy Midway" in the spring of 1942.

Though written in the same reader-friendly but authoritative style of At Dawn We Slept. Miracle at Midway is a slimmer, more muscular tome than the authors' Pearl Harbor investigation.  It glosses over many of the peripheral events of the Pacific War - such as the fall of Wake Island and the many little carrier raids carried out by the U.S. Navy - except when they're relevant to the Midway narrative, but otherwise the narrative covers every aspect of the battle - from Yamamoto's overly complex plan to lure the Pacific Fleet into battle by taking Midway to the furious aerial attacks by American land- and carrier-based planes on Admiral Nagumo's First Air Fleet. 

Attention to detail is given to the planning and execution of both American and Japanese operations in the Midway battle. Prange and his co-authors point out that Midway was Pearl Harbor in reverse; the Japanese, who had been careful and canny in December 1941, were overconfident and somewhat sloppy in planning and executing Operation MI. The Americans, who had been caught unprepared six months earlier, were able to break Japan's JN-25 Naval Communications Code and set a carefully laid ambush in the path of Japan's mighty Combined Fleet.

In this book, readers will discover (or rediscover) the amazing story of how the "underdog" American Navy was able to pull off what another chronicler of the Battle of Midway calls "an incredible victory.  In Miracle at Midway, they'll find fascinating and even heartrending stories of unbelievable drama and uncommon valor.

• The laborious efforts of Commander Joseph Rochefort and his "Hypo" team to break the Japanese fleet's top-secret JN-25 code
•  The effects of the Doolittle Raid on Japanese planning for Midway
• The differences between the Japanese preparations for Pearl Harbor and those for Operation MI
• The refusal of Midway's defenders to carry out a passive defense and its effects on the Invasion Force
• The heartrending story of the USS Hornet's Torpedo 8 squadron, which lost 15 of 15 planes in one of the many initially unsuccessful strikes against the Japanese carriers
• The decisive five minutes that turned the tables on the overconfident Japanese
• The late launch of a Japanese search plane and its effect on the Midway battle

My Viewpoint: I've been a World War II buff since I was a kid, and of the many battles of the Pacific Campaign, Midway has long been a particular favorite of mine.  I've read various books on it, including Walter Lord's popular - and a bit more readable - Incredible Victory, since I was in grade school, and I also watched (but loathe) director Jack Smight's Mdway, a 1976 flawed "epic" about the battle.

Although I prefer Lord's older and more readable Incredible Victory because that author told the story in a more natural manner, Miracle at Midway is still a very good account of the battle that doomed Japan.   I give it a strong recommendation, even though it has very few pictures and even fewer maps.