Midway: Luck or Judgement?
- rdfreeman987
- Jul 7
- 6 min read
Few decisive battles have been so indecisive in their early stages. Fewer still have turned on a bare five minutes. Even fewer battles have had their outcome described as a ‘miracle’. So, if the Japanese had the upper-hand for so long at Midway in 1942, did the Americans win by luck or judgement?
A quick recap of the intentions and the flow of the battle will expose the conundrum. Japan had expanded her empire across the Pacific Ocean until she held almost all the coastline of the great arc of islands from the Philippines to the Solomon Islands. But she could neither defend these new territories nor exploit their resources as long as the United States Pacific Fleet was in being. The Battle of Midway was to, at one stroke, eliminate a vital American refuelling station and lure American carriers to their destruction. (This was unfinished business from Pearl Harbor since the carriers had been famously absent that day in December 1941.)
It was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, who came up with the idea to invade Midway. The basic plan was simple and could have worked. He would send an invading force, accompanied by carriers. The invading force would take Midway and, by the time the American carriers arrived in retaliation the Japanese would be free to destroy the new arrivals. But, so confident were the Japanese, that they embellished their plan with irrelevant extras (such as a simultaneous attack on the Aleutian Islands) while failing to look for weaknesses in the plan itself. The result was that the commander of the strike force, Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo, entered the battle area without his submarine screen and without long-range reconnaissance planes. He also had a pitiful number of scouting planes. Perhaps this would not have mattered had he achieved surprise. But he had not. Through decoded signals, the Americans had full knowledge of the attack. Three of their carriers – Enterprise, Hornet and Yorktown were lying in wait as the Japanese invasion force approached Midway on 2 June 1942.
As the battle commenced two days later there was little to choose between the two sides. The Japanese had four carriers: Akagi, Hiryū, Kaga and Sōryū; the Americans had three carriers plus the Midway planes and runway. On board the Japanese carriers were 248 planes, while the Americans counted on 358 (231 on the carriers and 127 at Midway). But any advantage that the Americans gained in numbers was wiped out by the general inferiority of their planes in comparison with those of the Japanese. The one plus that the Americans had was a four-fold advantage in scouting planes. On the other hand, the only outstanding plane that the Americans had – the B-17 bomber – was of dubious value in this type of warfare.
We can therefore say that, at dawn on 4 June, there was no reason to assume that either side would be victorious. Hardware was not likely to be a determining factor. What mattered was how it was used.
And here we come to one of the oddest facts about carriers: at almost all times they are extraordinarily vulnerable. When their planes are on the hanger deck, they have no protection other than their anti-aircraft guns. When their planes are away on an attack, only a small air patrol remains to protect them. And when their flight decks are loaded with planes for take-off they are floating tinderboxes – one spark on deck brings a conflagration. So a commander’s survival in battle depends far more on protecting his vulnerable carriers than on inflicting damage on the enemy. This, as we shall see, Nagumo forgot.
A quick summary of the battle to the turning point will reveal Nagumo’s fatal over-confidence. We must remember (which he did not) that the primary purpose of attacking Midway was to lure the American carriers to the scene. Once they appeared, Midway would be of no significance. However, Nagumo had no idea of the presence of the Americans when he launched his first attack on Midway.
The Americans, knowing that the attack was coming, put all their serviceable Midway planes into the air at 6.00 am so that when the Japanese arrived half-an-hour later all they could do was bomb the airbase, which they did very effectively. Midway’s planes, meanwhile went off to attack the Japanese carriers. That attack was a fiasco. By 8.45 am Midway had lost almost all of its torpedo planes and dive-bombers yet had inflicted no significant damage on the carriers. (These catastrophic losses were the result of using outdated, flimsy, slow and unmanoeuvrable planes.) Round one had been a rout for the Americans, while the Japanese plan had worked to perfection. Nagumo prepared to receive his returning planes and ready them for a second attack on Midway.
In round two, the American planes which had left Enterprise and Hornet at 7.00 am, closed on the Japanese carriers. Fifteen out of sixteen torpedo planes were totally destroyed and the sixteenth ditched without one torpedo striking a carrier. Ten of the fourteen Devastator bombers from Enterprise were brought down without one bomb being placed on a carrier. Ten of another twelve torpedo planes, supported by six fighters, ended up in the sea. At 10.20 am, for no result whatsoever, the Americans had lost the whole of Hornet’s Torpedo Squadron 8, eight of Enterprise’s Torpedo Squadron 6 and ten of Yorktown’s Torpedo Squadron 3. The final outcome now seemed a foregone conclusion.
And then came the miracle. Lieutenant Commander Clarence McClusky, after an ingenious bit of intuition, found the Kaga with its planes refuelled and re-armed for the next Midway attack. With barely a Japanese fighter in the air, McClusky’s planes plunged down to the Kaga and landed three bombs on its deck. Almost instantaneously the carrier was a mass of flame from stem to stern. Seeing the parlous state of the carrier Lieutenant Commander Richard Best led off his planes to attack the nearby Akagi. It was also caught without air cover as Best dropped a bomb clean through its deck. Minutes later the carrier was a burning wreck. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Commander Maxwell Leslie’s planes from Yorktown dealt the same fate to Sōryū. Three carriers totally wrecked in five minutes.
This was not the end of the battle. The Hiryū fought on to the next day and Yorktown fell victim to its planes, but victory had gone to the Americans in those five miraculous minutes.
So, was it luck or judgement? Had the Japanese stuck to their first plan they ought to have won. That they did not was down to hubris. Things were so stacked in their favour when they first began planning that they dropped their guard. Confident of a walk-over victory, they complicated and compromised a bold and achievable plan. Had the Japanese not forgotten that the Midway attack was only the bait to lure the American carriers to battle, they would have gone into action with more scout planes and put much more effort into locating the American ships. As it was they casually attacked the minor target of Midway and, so confident were they that there were no American carriers nearby, they even prepared for a second attack. All this was made worse by their simultaneous attack on the Aleutian Islands, which drew away forces that would have give overwhelming victory at Midway. On the Japanese side, therefore, their defeat was not in any way due to bad luck but to bad judgement and over-confidence.
On the American side, their performance up to 10.20 am on 3 June raises serious questions of judgement. They went to sea with the express intention of sinking Japanese carriers with torpedoes and bombs launched from low-level planes. These planes were not fast enough, nor strong enough, nor manoeuvrable enough to attack a carrier defended by the fearsome Japanese Zero fighters, combined with carrier anti-aircraft fire.
The catastrophic losses sustained by the Americans up to 10.20 am are clear proof that, even with all the advantage gained from decoded signals, their battle plan was foolhardy in the extreme. They were simply not equipped to face their enemy. There was never any chance of the flimsy American planes penetrating a defence of ten to twenty Zeros around one carrier. The ‘miracle’ was only possible because of grave errors by Nagumo. He had learnt of the American presence while refuelling and re-arming was under way. He had just minutes to decide whether to continue arming for a ground attack on Midway, or switch to armour-piercing bombs for an attack on the US carriers. Nagumo stuck to his plan and continued to prepare for the second Midway attack. He had lost all sense of proportion. Midway was no threat to his fleet, yet nearby there were carriers (he did not know how many) within easy flying range of his undefended flight decks. In these few minutes, Nagumo handed victory to the Americans.
So there was bad judgement on both sides. Both were also too optimistic. But luck delivered the battle to the Americans.
Richard Freeman
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