Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (52 page)

Religious fervor, Bushido, hari-kari, going down with the ship, and the kamikazes lent the Japanese a sense of arrogance in victory—and fanaticism and fatalism in defeat. But such practices often had negative ramifications in the mundane practice of war itself and would prove no substitute for the freewheeling individualism of a “decadent” foe. Brilliant admirals are still needed after their ships blow up. Seasoned pilots are more valuable as instructors than as suicide bombers. Junior officers who are vocal rather than silent are critical assets; assessing rather than accepting blame may be shameful, but it is often indispensable in war; and the expertise of skilled generals is lost when they disembowel themselves. By the same token, ingenious Japanese sailors have hands-on experience that admirals should freely hear about. War planners need to fear an informed and aroused electorate; and arguing with an emperor over strategy is often a more fruitful exercise than bowing in his presence.

Despite claims of creating a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere among conquered fellow Orientals in Korea, Southeast Asia, China, and the Pacific islands, Japan possessed no sustained tradition of a free voting citizenry or the idea that non-Japanese Asians would wish to join the Japanese army in the hopes of someday receiving the same constitutional guarantees and freedoms as the Japanese themselves. Japan would live and die by the race card—defining (and demonizing) America as “white” and thus Japan as a kindred but clearly superior “yellow” people. Inside Japan itself during the battle of Midway, there were no free press, no elections, and a military dictatorship that functioned ostensibly at the beck and call of an emperor-king. The result was the fascinating anomaly that whereas the Asian countries surrounding Japan had been subjected to decades of onerous French, Dutch, German, British, and American racism and imperialism, indigenous populations, after initial celebrations greeting their Asian liberators, were more likely to aid the “white” Americans than their brethren Asian Japanese. After all, the elected government of the former might at some distant time extend independence to its subjects and satellites; the dictatorship of the latter—self-defined as a race rather than an idea—spelled only economic exploitation with no chance of parity at any future date. The hearts of men in a democracy are more likely to change and evolve than the will of the emperor.

Whereas in theory the Americans could be a culture rather than a race (although blacks, for example, were still shamefully denied the vote in many American states and fought in the Pacific in segregated roles, and often as cooks and orderlies), the entire creed of Japanese militarism rested on the implicit assumption of innate Japanese racial superiority over its “inferior” Asian subject peoples. Had Japan embraced a Western democratic tradition and a cultural shift to individualism and self-expression, it might well have been able to galvanize the entire Asian subcontinent against the grasping Europeans—but, then, under that scenario there might well have been no need for World War II.

If the absence of such liberal institutions hampered the overall Japanese war effort on June 4, 1942, it was the regimentation of the Japanese military culture itself, seen mostly in the sheer absence of individuality, that would prove so critical in such a fast-moving and far-ranging battle like Midway. Close examination of the battle suggests that the Americans’ intrinsic faith in individualism, a product itself of a long tradition of consensual government and free expression, at every turn of the encounter proved decisive. Far better than luck, surprise, or accident, the power of the individual himself explains the Americans’ incredible victory.

SPONTANEITY AND INDIVIDUAL INITIATIVE AT MIDWAY

It would be a caricature of the complex relationship of soldier to state to suggest that Americans at Midway were individualists whereas Japanese sailors and pilots were unthinking automatons. Obedience is the nature of military life in nearly every culture. Without a chain of command, orders and military discipline cannot exist. The American navy was highly disciplined at Midway, and there were thousands of imaginative and brilliant Japanese soldiers who did give their best ad hoc efforts to remedy the disaster on June 4.

That being said, individualism was a different notion in the traditional culture of Japan, whose citizenry for centuries had seen little need to elect representatives, freely to write and say what they wished, or to demonstrate spontaneously for a redress of grievances:

A willingness to subordinate the individual to the group, to sacrifice individual interests for the good of the family, for the good of the village, and for the good of the nation (it being understood that in the case of incompatibility of these goods, the good of the larger group must come first), combined with a stress on harmony in the family, in the village, and in the nation which held that any threat to unity was morally wrong, and he who created conflict by a challenge to the status quo was necessarily the wrong-doer. (R. Dore,
Land Reform in Japan,
393)

Even those scholars who resent the stereotypical and Eurocentric view that the Japanese put little premium on individualism—and thus consensual government itself—have conceded that the Japanese notion of the individual evolved differently from the practice in the West:

To the Western reader, even to one who lived through the 1930s in Germany, the Japanese military’s authoritarian pyramid of support, based on these stratified hamlets, must seem suffocating and restrictive. How many of us would have been willing to subordinate our individuality completely to family, village, and nation? And yet there is no reason to conclude that Japanese who did not belong to the prominent stratum of this organic society believed that they were being suffocated, or dictated to, or if they did, minded it. (R. Smethurst,
A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism,
182)

We do not wish to suggest that highly motivated and disciplined Japanese troops, who were uniformly courageous and without exception willing to die for their emperor, were therein less capable warriors than the Americans. Rather, in a complex and drawn-out battle like Midway, and even more so during the Pacific War in general, there were numerous opportunities lost to the imperial fleet due to a lack of initiative endemic within the Japanese military—and this was typical rather than exceptional of Japanese society at large. Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya, high-ranking veterans of the Japanese navy, offer a near Thucydidean analysis of their imperial navy’s defeat at Midway:

In the final analysis, the root cause of Japan’s defeat, not alone in the Battle of Midway but in the entire war, lies deep in the Japanese national character. There is an irrationality and impulsiveness about our people which results in actions that are haphazard and often contradictory. A tradition of provincialism makes us narrow-minded and dogmatic, reluctant to discard prejudices and slow to adopt even necessary improvements if they require a new concept. Indecisive and vacillating, we succumb readily to conceit, which in turn makes us disdainful of others. Opportunistic but lacking in a spirit of daring and independence, we are wont to place reliance on others and to truckle to superiors. (M. Fuchida and M. Okumiya,
Midway, the
Battle That Doomed Japan
, 247)

In at least four critical ways—the breaking of the Japanese naval codes, the repair of the carrier Yorktown, the nature of the U.S. naval command, and the behavior of American pilots—the American faith in individuality rather than group consensus, spontaneity rather than rote, and informality rather than hierarchy proved decisive at Midway.

The
Code
Breakers

The most obvious contrast was in the critical sphere of intelligence gathering, which may have decided the battle before it had begun. The deciphering of constantly altered encoded messages, as opposed to behind-the-lines espionage and covert intelligence gathering in general, is a fine art. It combines complex mathematical skills, a sophisticated knowledge of linguistics, a social and historical awareness of the context in which secret messages are transmitted, familiarity with the mechanics of radio transmission, and a commonsense appraisal of what is likely rather than what is absolutely proved to be transmitted. The example of the brilliant British efforts at cracking top-secret German codes—the Bletchley Park decrypts of Wehrmacht telegraphed messages collectively known as ULTRA—illustrates that the best code breakers are individualistic, often eccentric thinkers, from all walks of life, though often overrepresented by those formerly ensconced in university mathematics and language departments.

Such highly creative minds function best when given autonomy and a general relaxation from protocols of military discipline. The persona of the decipherer is often not merely ill suited but antithetical to military regimentation. The American navy’s cryptanalysts, in their informality and nonconformity, seem similar to the unorthodox renegades who created the computer revolution forty years later in the Silicon Valley of California. It is surely no accident that of all the belligerents in World War II, the British and the Americans, with formal military branches of crypt-analysis dating back to World War I and completely autonomous universities, were the most accomplished code breakers—and the Japanese the most dismal.

Before the Japanese fleet arrived anywhere near Midway, the American high command knew approximately the general location, direction, timetable, and objectives of Yamamoto’s armada. The frantic American efforts to fortify and equip the once mostly neglected Midway with planes, artillery, and troops; the rapid mustering of the American naval counterresponse; the failure of the Japanese submarines to find, much less attack, the American fleet; and the safe transit of the American carriers to a strategic point to lie in wait for the arriving Japanese ships were all due to the American navy’s breaking of Japanese encoded telegraphed messages. By mid-May 1942 Midway was suddenly bristling with guns, planes, and defenders, and it is hard to imagine that the Japanese invasion force could have easily taken the main island, even had their fleet knocked out the American carriers.

The men generally credited with pioneering the American navy’s effort at cracking the critical top Japanese naval code—known as JN-25 of some 45,000 five-digit numbers—were Commanders Joseph J. Rochefort and Laurence Safford. “I didn’t keep very good files,” Rochefort confessed of his work. “I carried it all in my head” (G. Prange,
Miracle at Midway,
20). In slippers and smoking jacket, Rochefort ran an unusually autonomous Pacific Fleet Combat Intelligence Unit (known as HYPO), which was more or less given free rein by Safford in a windowless basement office at Pearl Harbor to decipher Japanese transmissions as it saw best:

It is difficult to determine which of the two was the more eccentric. Safford, who graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1916, was one of those people who are the despair of uniform tailors as well as orderly organizations. He wore his hair in the “mad-professor” style and talked disjointedly because his mouth could not keep up with his mind; his forte was pure mathematics. Rochefort was mild-mannered, dedicated, and serious but also persistent, energetic, and impatient of hierarchies and bureaucracy, his mind unfettered by orthodox officer training. (D. van der Vat,
The
Pacific Campaign, World War II,
88–89)

Rochefort’s tight-knit group received the full support of the traditional Admiral Nimitz, who was not in the least fazed by his men’s appearance or the manner in which HYPO was run. True, the freethinking, strange-looking assortment of unmilitary types raised eyebrows elsewhere in the American high command—Admiral King was unimpressed with their operation. But it is impossible to imagine their counterparts in the Japanese navy, in which such informality, neglect of protocol, queer dress and appearance, failure to keep meticulous records, and a general disdain for military life could not be excused on the premise that a collection of intellectuals and assorted oddballs needed such freedom and exemption to further the war effort.

Most serious students of Midway have no hesitation in attributing much of the American victory to Rochefort’s effort. Samuel Eliot Morison concluded that Midway “was a victory of intelligence, bravely and wisely applied” (
Coral Sea, Midway, and Submarine Actions, May 1942–August
1942,
158). The Japanese veterans and historians Fuchida and Okumiya concur in their analysis of the first major naval defeat of the Japanese in modern times:

[I]t is beyond the slightest possibility of doubt that the advance discovery of the Japanese plan to attack was the foremost single and immediate cause of Japan’s defeat. Viewed from the Japanese side, this success of the enemy’s intelligence translated itself into a failure on our part—a failure to take adequate precautions for guarding the secrecy of our plans. . . . But it was a victory of American intelligence in a much broader sense than this. Equally as important as the positive achievements of the enemy’s intelligence on this occasion was the negatively bad and ineffective functioning of Japanese intelligence. (
Midway, the Battle That Doomed Japan
, 232)

The individualism of Rochefort and his group—and their ability and freedom to function successfully within the American military—were representative of a long Western emphasis on self-expression and initiative that were dividends of constitutional government, market capitalism, and personal freedom. Hundreds of brave Japanese sailors would be cremated at Midway because an officer working in his slippers knew they were coming.

The
Repair
of
the
Yorktown

If intelligence gave the Americans prior warning of the Japanese plan of attack, the amazing restoration of the damaged aircraft carrier
Yorktown
ensured that there would be three, not two, American carriers to meet Admiral Nagumo’s four. Without the vital role of the
Yorktown
’s air squadrons in sinking the Japanese carriers, and the carrier’s drawing the entire Japanese counteroffensive away from the
Enterprise
and
Hornet,
the battle could easily have been lost. The constant dogfighting of Jimmy Thatch’s Wildcat fighters, the superb dive-bombing of Max Leslie’s SBDs, and the sacrifice of Lem Massey’s Devastators would not have been possible were it not for the innovative repair work on their mother ship done a few days earlier at Pearl Harbor.

The
Yorktown
had suffered major damage less than a month before Midway, receiving at least one direct bomb hit and numerous near misses on May 8 during the battle of Coral Sea. Japanese naval bombers had ruined the flight deck, destroyed galleries and bulkheads deep inside the ship, lowered her speed to twenty-five knots, and cracked her armor belt. Several near misses had acted like depth charges and cracked apart her fuel lines, resulting in massive oil slicks. She limped back into Pearl Harbor on May 27, with interior electrical cables and fuel tanks ruined. Her air squadrons were decimated from losses to Japanese planes and antiaircraft fire. The Japanese at any rate were convinced that
Yorktown
had sunk in the Coral Sea. Most professional American estimates forecast that a thorough repair job would require at least three months, and possibly six to make her perfectly seaworthy.

Instead, work began minutes after
Yorktown
had reached the Pearl Harbor dry dock. Before the water had even drained completely from the yard, engineers, maintenance technicians, and assorted fabricators, accompanied by Admiral Nimitz himself, were walking around the huge ship in hip boots, inspecting the damage and jotting down needed materials. Thousands of individual agendas were immediately set into motion:

Over 1,400 men—shipfitters, shipwrights, machinists, welders, electricians—poured in, over and under the ship; they and the yard shopmen worked in shifts the rest of that day and the next and during the whole of two nights, making the bulkhead stanchions and deck plates necessary to restore the ship’s structural strength, and replacing the wiring, instruments and fixtures damaged in the blast. (S. Morison, Coral Sea, Midway, and
Submarine Actions, May 1942–August 1942
, 81)

Local residents complained of power outages as hundreds of electric arc welders drained the island’s power grid. Much of the work was done ad hoc without blueprints or formal instruction:

There was no time for plans or sketches. The men worked directly with the steel beams and bars brought on the ship. Coming to a damaged frame, burners would take out the worst of it; fitters would line up a new section, cut it to match the contour of the damage; riggers and welders would move in, “tacking” the new piece in place. Then on to the next job. . . . (W. Lord,
Incredible Victory,
36–37)

The result was that less than sixty-eight hours after she had arrived, on Saturday morning, May 30,
Yorktown,
with electricians and mechanics still on board, outfitted with new planes and replacement pilots, left dry dock. The last repairmen left by motor launch as the carrier headed out of port to meet Admiral Nagumo’s carriers. In celebration of the amazing feat, the band of the carrier that was heading farther west, not back east as once promised, ironically played “California, Here I Come” on the patched-together flight deck.

Far different was the Japanese reaction to damage done to and loss of pilots of their two newest and most deadly carriers,
Shokaku
and
Zuikaku,
when the latter returned from the same battle of Coral Sea. Of the
Shokaku,
which sailed into the Kure naval base (ten days
earlier
than
Yorktown
arrived at Pearl Harbor, and with far less structural damage), the fleet’s air commander, Captain Yoshitake Miwa, concluded that its damage was not serious but nevertheless might require three months of repair work. Her sister carrier, the
Zuikaku,
although utterly untouched by the Americans, had lost 40 percent of her aircrews at Coral Sea; thus, she sat in port in excellent condition during the entire battle of Midway waiting for replacement planes and pilots. The contrast between the American and Japanese responses to repairing the respective damage from the Coral Sea engagement was undeniable: