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Fuchida, Mitsuo and Masatake Okumiya. Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan, the Japanese Navy’s Story. Annapolis MD: Naval Institute Press, 1992. 300pp. ISBN 1-55750-428-8.

“With Midway as the turning point, the fortunes of war appeared definitely to shift from our own to the Allied side. The defeat taught us many lessons and impelled our Navy, for the first time since the outbreak of war, to indulge in critical self-examination.” – Mitsuo Fuchida

It was designed to be the crowning achievement of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Fueled by memories its other great naval victories; the Battle of the Yalu River (1894), the Battle of Tsushima (1905), and the stunning victory at Pearl Harbor, this was to be the pentacle achievement as the navy would eliminate the remaining forces of the U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet. As followers of naval tactician Alfred T. Mahan, they would draw the U.S. Navy into the decisive battle that would allow the Japanese to destroy the last threat to their dominance of the Pacific basin, the American carrier force.

The Japanese was anything but simple. It would comprise itself of a diversionary force that would attack the Aleutians while the main force would drive on the little island of Midway. The attack was designed to draw the American carriers into the teeth of the Japanese offensive force with 4 main battle carriers ready to take out the U.S. fleet. By the end of the battle, this great dream lay in complete shambles. The four main carriers under Admiral Nagumo had been destroyed. The majority of Japan’s first rate pilots had been killed. The Imperial Japanese Navy would no longer wield absolute dominance over the Pacific and would remain on the defensive for the rest of the war.

Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan, the Japanese Navy’s Story examines the events and mistakes that lead to this greatest of Japanese defeats from an interesting perspective. It looks at the defeat from the Japanese perspective. Authors Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya both have unique insight in the battle that allows them to put together a clear picture of what was happening with the Japanese commanders. Fuchida, well known as the commander of the air fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor, was aboard the Akagi during the fateful battle having just undergone an emergency appendectomy the day they had left port. Okumiya was serving aboard the Ryujo with the Aleutian attack force allowing the two to collaborate in producing a complete picture of the fight.

The authors take their own personal experience in the battle and combine it with the official post battle work they did as well with the official U.S. Naval records on the event to put together a very complete account of the Japanese defeat. They conclude that the most responsible party in this loss falls on the shoulders of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. The book provides extensive analysis of the failures in Yamamoto’s plan which left Nagumo with a plan of attack too rigid to withstand any deviation or eventuality. As a result when things did begin to go wrong, there was no alternative that would readily keep the bad situation from getting worse. Yamamoto had doomed his fleet to destruction.

This book is a fascinating read for anyone who is interested in the Japanese mindset at this critical point in history. The astute reader will pick up on the cultural aspects that contributed to the failure beyond the collapse of the plan. Fuchida makes his case for Yamamoto’s responsibility for the failure, yet you still detect a sense of respect and subservice to the man in his criticisms. This can also be seen in his description of the Naval General Staff which in accordance of the chain of command should have been able to reel in Yamamoto, but were unable to oppose him because of the amount of prestige he had garnered as a result of the success at Pearl Harbor. This book illustrates that the defeat at Midway was as much a cultural defeat as it was an operational one. For anyone looking to get a broader perspective of the battle of Midway, this should be considered required reading.

CougarGA7

Cougar

Hate to rain on your parade, but Fuchida is about as good a read as Herman Wouk’s “Winds of War” when it comes to historical accuracy. Many of his statements were thoroughly debunked among Japanese historians years ago, and have now been debunked in America by Parshall & Tully’s “Shattered Sword; the Untold Story of the Battle of Midway.” For example, Parshall & Tully refute the allegation that the late launch of Tone’s #4 search plane was the reason for the failure to spot the American fleet. In fact, it was a float plane from Chikuma that should have spotted TF 16 earlier, but failed to do so. Fuchida states that Nagumo failed to execute a “two-phase” search, but at that time no navy had a two-phase search in their doctrine, and it had never been done before.

Also, Fuchida states that the Japanese strike on the American fleet was spotted on the deck and ready to take off, when suddenly the American dive bombers showed up and destroyed the fleet. There are two problems with this account. One is that the Japanese NEVER spotted those attack planes on their carrier decks. All of those planes were still below in the hangar decks, as the fleet was too busy conducting CAP operations. Second, Nagumo was too late in any event. He would have had to have started spotting his strike two or three hours earlier to catch the Americans before they launched their own strike.

“Shattered Sword” explodes several more myths about Midway, and when I get home I’ll post a few of them.

And when I get a moment here in the office, I have some excellent diagrams from “Shattered Sword” to post.

It's actually a quite accurate account from the Japanese perspective. Most errors and contradictions which exist even in the Japanese records are addressed by footnotes as well as several of Fuchida's mistakes in the book. This is a first hand account of the attack and is subject to the fallacies of all first hand accounts which you just have to deal with in any history. In fact I think it was Tully who said "first hand accounts are often best accounts." Notice there is not a lot of self critisism in "Panzer Leader" or "War As I Knew It" either. The important thing is that it provides a good historiography, even better than Shattered Sword.

When looking at Parshall and Tully's criticisms of Fuchida you really get a mixed bag. On the two-phase patrol, they quote from pages 131 to 133 of Midway. However, the quoted text is nowhere in my copy of Midway and pages 131-133 cover the Battle of the Coral Sea and does not mention search patterns at all. In Midway, Fuchida claims to ask Lieutenant Furukaway if they were using a single-phase search system to which he is told "Yes, Sir. As usual." (page 178) He mentions in his post attack analysis that a two phase search plan would have been better, but does not make any mention as to whether this was an option at a time. He readily points out that this is from the perspective of hindsight.

So when they make the claim that Fuchida's two-phase assessment is based on hindsight, then they are correct since Fuchida represents it as such as well. What is particularly interesting though is how they say that two-phase searches were "totally unknown" and use USF-74 doctrine, which is U.S. Navy doctrine, does not mention two-phase searches. Only problem with that is the Japanese did not use USF-74 and just because it wasn't in U.S. Navy doctrine, it does not mean it is not "totally unknown", even to the U.S. Navy, much less the IJN. The introduction of two-phase as doctrine after the battle is not too surprising considering the failures in the Solomons and Midway (May 1943). The document they site for that is called the "Research on Mobile Force Tactics" in which the two-phase would fall under Part 4, subsection D "Gathering Intelligence". This is a wholesale change in doctrine, yet still has a section called "Importance of Decisive Battle". Looks like some lessons just cant be learned.

Interestingly enough, Fuchida does make the claim that TF16 from the Chikuma should have spotted the American carriers, but did not. He states that "had the observer of the Chikuma plane been more watchful on the outward leg of his search, or had the seaplanes been catapulted on schedule, the disaster that followed might have been avoided." I agree with this assessment. The plane that did spot the American fleet was the one that was delayed. Had it launched on time then they would have spotted the American fleet earlier and before, or at least very early in the rearming efforts on the Kaga and Akagi. The first plane should have seen them, but didn't. The second plan did see them, but late. These both contributed to the disaster for the Japanese. I think Fuchida nails that one on the head really.

As far as spotting planes, Fuchida's mention that the Akagi was spotted is probably not accurate. There were some planes top side, but not all of them. The flight crews were moving the planes to the top deck as soon as they were rearmed. Since this process was not complete when they were hit, then they couldn't all have been spotted on the Akagi as he claims. But there were some planes up and they were probably making ready. You will find other aspects too, like the disputed capabilities of the Akagi radio equipment and such.

I understand that Shattered Sword is very critical of Fuchida's work, but honestly it is overly so. There is a lot of value to be had in reading this book and it is mostly accurate. In fact very much so for a first hand account. There are flaws in the details but I can make the same case on Shattered Sword. But the most important aspect of this book is the insight into the Japanese mindset as to where they were, what they thought they could accomplish, and how they reacted when it all went wrong. Sometimes the historiography is more important than the history and this is one of those cases.

We can disagree on what Fuchida meant by his statement about the two-phase search. To the extent that he argues that Nagumo did not devote sufficient assets to his reconnaissance effort, most people would agree with him. I wonder whether Fuchida actually used the phrase “single phase search” on the bridge of Akagi when there is no evidence the Japanese had ever trained for anything else. Why call it a single phase search when that's all you do? Why not just call it a search and say “how many planes do we have out?”

Parshall & Tully clearly caught Fuchida in a falsehood regarding the status of the strike on the American carriers when Massey & Leslie showed up. That myth has been enshrined in American lore, as seen in the movie “Midway.” Despite what the other posters stated about that film, I thought it was utterly horrible and I refuse to watch it or add it to my video library. But to get back to the point of Fuchida’s veracity, it must be the lawyer in me. Once I catch someone in a falsehood the very next question is “on what other topic have they provided false information?”

I don't doubt that Fuchida’s book has historic value as the memoir of someone who was there. So do “The Rommel Papers,” “Inside the Third Reich” and “Lost Victories.” I have copies of all three (wish I had them in the original German) but I certainly don't take them as the gospel truth. All three have been debunked to a greater or lesser extent, but at one time they were considered accurate primary sources. Just like Fuchida, they won the race to the publisher.

You may consider Parshall & Tully overly harsh in their treatment of Fuchida, or even of Walter Lord and Gordon Prange. I haven't read Lord but do have a copy of Prange. When attacking a myth, maybe they felt that the evidence was so conclusive that they had to go all-in. I consider “Shattered Sword” to be a very well researched book that approaches the Battle of Midway differently from traditional histories by going into a level of detail not addressed in the other works. That it was a truly momentous battle, probably in the top 5 in all of naval history, is no less in doubt after their book than it was before.

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