Midway: The Pacific War’s Most Famous Battle

“Using a wealth of information and his own naval background, the author makes a convincing case that really transforms the traditional views of the American victory at Midway.”

The Battle of Midway has long been considered the turning point of the Pacific Campaign of World War II. With titles like Miracle at Midway and Incredible Victory the common historiography of the battle has been the plucky Americans using their code breaking to send the Pacific Fleet into a desperate battle against overwhelming odds to achieve an inconceivable victory over a vastly superior Imperial Japanese Navy.

Author Mark Stille is having none of this mythology and takes a deeper look at the strategic, operational, and tactical decisions of both the American and Japanese commanders to show that in fact, an American victory was more possible and in fact likely than commonly assumed.

The book starts with a tactical analysis of an almost forgotten action of the war—the sortie into the Indian Ocean in early 1942 of five aircraft carriers of the  Japanese Mobile Strike Force, the most powerful component of the Imperial Japanese Navy, seeking out the British Eastern Fleet for battle. Eerily foreshadowing many of the events of the Midway battle, the outcome is far different as the Japanese Navy wins nearly every tactical engagement, forcing the Royal Navy to virtually abandon the eastern Indian Ocean under the relentless onslaught of Japanese naval air power.

However, as Stille begins his analysis, immediately after this sortie, the leadership of the Japanese Navy, led by Admiral Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the Pearl Harbor attack, begins to make a series of decisions that will ultimately lead to their defeat at Midway.

Strategically, these decision start with splitting up the six carrier Mobile Strike Force and sending two carriers to the Battle of the Coral Sea. During the subsequent battle with a task force of two American carriers, one of these carriers is badly damaged and the other suffers significant loses to their air group, eliminating both from participating in the Midway operation.

This dispersion of forces continues when the Japanese begin planning the invasion of Midway. As Stille highlights, the Japanese, although they significantly outnumbered the Americans, dispersed their ships into smaller task forces that ended up not being mutually supporting. As the battle played out, all the major combat was conducted by the air groups of four Japanese and three American carriers, a disadvantage for the US Navy, but not insurmountable when taking into account the American aircraft also stationed on Midway Island. This simple fact brings into focus the battle was not as much of a numerical mismatch as many histories have portrayed.

Operationally, once the two navies were at sea, the Japanese made additional mistakes based on a toxic combination of their overconfidence and inadequate doctrine and planning. The biggest shortfall, which is often cited in other works but more deeply explored by Stille was the use or neglect of intelligence information in planning and conducting the battle. The Japanese Navy made several assumptions about what how the American Navy would react to events and did not make use of the limited intelligence information available to them even as circumstances clearly changed in the early phases of the battle. 

In contrast, Admiral Nimitz, the Pacific Fleet commander, placed critical trust in his intelligence to formulate his battle plans and place the American Navy in a position to deal a critical blow to the Japanese Fleet. The American task force commanders also did a better job of interpreting the incomplete information coming in from scouting forces as both navies attempted to locate each other and try a first strike.

But in the end, the success of the battle came down to the aircrews in the cockpits and their decisions in the heat of battle as they anxiously watched for not only enemy ships and aircraft but kept an eye on dwindling fuel gauges as well. Tactically, the combat was much more evenly matched, and the outcome of the battle hinged on a few critical decisions by naval aviators whose names would go down in American naval lore for bravery and sacrifice.

In particularly the battle winning attacks by Navy dive bombers over the Mobile Strike Force on the morning of June 4 were probably the closest thing to a providential event of the entire Pacific war up to that point. After successfully fighting off multiple waves of American attackers while trying to recover and prepare to launch more aircraft, the Japanese carriers were in a uniquely vulnerable situation when the squadrons of American aircraft began their steep dives.

The battle still hung in the balance when one Navy pilot quickly decided to break off from the rest of his squadron to attack an untargeted Japanese carrier and singlehandedly dropped the one critical bomb of the Pacific War, which badly damaged and ultimately sank the Japanese flagship of the Mobile Strike Force, one of four Japanese carriers that would ultimately be sunk.

Using a wealth of information and his own naval background, the author makes a convincing case that really transforms the traditional views of the American victory at Midway. Ultimately the US Navy’s victory was not a miracle but the result of superior American use of intelligence to plan operations; the result of Japanese failures of intelligence and decision making under pressure; and the combination of some luck and a lot of determination to drive home the critical dive-bombing attacks that turned the tide of the Pacific War. Even if you think you know everything about the Battle of Midway, this book will change how you think about the most famous naval battle of the Pacific War.