 Well, good afternoon Naval War College. Great to see Admiral Hogg here with us, Ambassador Peters, and we're really thrilled and privileged to have probably one of the nation's most renowned authors on the battle midway as each and every one of us here at the Naval War College and across the entire United States Navy begin to commemorate and celebrate one of our greatest naval battles in our history, the Battle of Midway. Jonathan Partial, the author of Shattered Swore, the Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. He's a native from Minneapolis, Minnesota and he's probably the United States expert on the Imperial Japanese Navy. He's been studying it since his childhood and he admits that it's a little bit more than just a passing fancy. He's written for the United States Naval War College review. He's written for the Naval Institute Proceedings and the World War II magazine. He's contributed to several books on the topic. In 1995 and try to remember 1995, the internet was at its infancy. He created a website called www.combinedfleet.com and as we were talking over lunch, he was telling me how rudimentary it was pretty much two pages and a picture of his dog. And today it's the foremost internet site on the Imperial Navy with over 50,000 visitors monthly. He was a member of the 1999 expedition by Nautica's Corporation and the Naval Oceanographic Office that discovered wreckage from the carrier Kaga, Sanket Midway. He's a graduate of Carlton College and the Carlson School of Management and he works in senior management at the Minnesota Software Company. And as I mentioned, he lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Margaret, children Anna and Derek and catch this. He has cats named Hiryu and Soryu. So this is something that is quite normal in their household. So we're really excited to have Jonathan with us. He's going to come up and give us some of his thoughts. And I should mention he brought a good friend of his, Mark Horan, who came here, a math teacher who's also been a contributor to the book. So we're honored to have both of them here. But please give a warm welcome to Jonathan Partial. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. I have no doubt that there are probably some faculty members here at least who are thinking to themselves, you know, this guy again because I've been here, this will be the third time now in the last eight years that I have stood on this stage to talk about Midway. And I guess all that I can say is that that is a testament to just how shallow the pool of Midway scholars must be that they keep having me back. But nevertheless, here I am. And probably too, some of you have noticed the title slide and are thinking, you know, what's with the question mark? You know, turning point in the Pacific. We're here to commemorate the most important naval victory in U.S. history. And that doesn't look very triumphal, you know, shouldn't be a big exclamation point of some sort. And I guess what I would say is that this battle like all great battles has had a lot of hyperbole thrown out regarding it over the years. And we use phrases like turning point and kind of just casually toss those out there. But what does turning point really mean in the context of a war as big and complex as World War II? And another word that we use, decisive, often gets thrown out regarding Midway. But what does decisive really mean in the context of a war like the Pacific War? So those are sort of underlying themes that I want to explore today in the course of my talk and just, you know, keep that in the back of your mind. So three things that I want to do. I want to give you a little context for the battle. Where did the battle come from? Why did we end up fighting over Midway? And I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on that. If you're interested in a good book on that, I can recommend one. But I'm just going to talk about that briefly. Then I want to tell you three stories about the battle of Midway itself. Each of which I think are sort of little turning points within the battle. Two of them I think are still pretty poorly understood even to this day. And one of them actually has a plot twist that I only learned about seven and a half ago, which sort of illustrates that the scholarship on the battle continues to advance. And then finally I want to zoom back up to the big picture again and examine Midway, talk about its meaning within the wider context of the Pacific War. So without further ado, I think it's difficult for us to remember 72 years on just what an incredibly grim dark time the beginning of 1942 really was. That if you were a kid sitting around the dinner table listening to your parents talking at this point in time, you know, you would have been hearing a lot of dark mutterings and place names that you'd probably never heard of before, you know, Batan, Corregidor, Malaya, Singapore. The war had been going absolutely disastrously for the Allies up to this point. And in the course of that, the Japanese had been triumphant everywhere where they had gone. A lot of very valuable Allied naval hardware had gone glub, glub, glub. And I think that that's sort of analogous for the nation's feeling at this time that we had taken some real body blows. This had been a humiliating route for us. And if there was not a sense of desperation, there certainly were a lot of very tense moments and people were really wondering how is this war going to end up. Because in the course of just a few short months the Japanese had launched a series of attacks across the western Pacific and into southeast Asia that had secured for themselves one of the largest empires in the history of mankind. And they had done it at trivial cost to themselves. The problem then for the Japanese becomes, well, what's next? And they begin turning to this issue in the March, April timeframe of 1942. And the driver of that conversation in Japan is this gentleman, Yamamoto Isoroku, who is the commander in chief of Japan's combined fleet. He reasons that the only important American naval asset that is left in the Pacific at this point is our aircraft carriers. And he is determined to destroy those aircraft carriers if at all possible. At the same time he would very much like to be able to occupy the Hawaiian islands if he can make that happen. Because if he can actually have those islands as a hostage that could be a very important bargaining chip for end of war negotiations with the Americans. So he's looking for some battle site somewhere in the central Pacific that is close enough to Pearl Harbor that he can lure those carriers out to come to the fight. But far enough away from the organic air power that is on Oahu that that can't get tangled up in the battle that he wants to create. Meanwhile on the other side of the pond we have Chester Nimitz who is the commander in chief of the Pacific fleet. And Nimitz is not desperately but certainly very urgently trying to figure out how he is going to turn around this train wreck of a war. Nimitz too is very clear on the fact that he's still got four carriers on his roster and those have got to be his main offensive assets. And he very much wants to figure out a way to bring the Japanese carrier force to battle and destroy it if at all possible. His big trump card is of course we have broken Japan's operational codes and we are reading enough of their signal traffic at this point to get wind of the fact starting in late April Mayish timeframe that something very big is planned in the Central Pacific. And that in a nutshell is why we end up fighting a major sea battle over two insignificant specks of coral sitting out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So let's talk a little bit about Midway. What actually happened at Midway. Let me give you some stories. And the first one actually happens a little bit before Midway. It's called Operation K. Operation K was commissioned by the Japanese to ascertain the whereabouts of the American aircraft carriers just prior to the battle. So the basic deal was they were going to use two of these gentlemen, the Kawanishi Emily which was I think arguably the finest flying boat of the war and certainly the longest range recon asset that the Japanese had. And they were going to take these guys off from Wotchi. They were going to fly the 2,000 miles up to Pearl Harbor and they were going to take a look around and see if the American carriers were in Pearl Harbor. After that they were going to hop a little bit further up the Hawaiian island change and plop themselves down here at French Frigate Shoals which is an uninhabited atoll. Reason being that the Emily long range as it is does not have the legs to go out and back in one hop. So the game plan would be that they would meet this gentleman who would top off the fuel tanks and then they would fly the rest of the way back to their operational base at Wake. They had actually done this mission once before in March and it had come off relatively well at least as far as the refueling arrangements were concerned. Well, the Americans in the intel community were very, very interested in how it was that the Japanese had actually managed to get flying boats over at the top of Pearl Harbor. And they started putting two and two together and thought to themselves, you know, French Frigate Shoals might be a place that they were using as a refueling point. Slow and whole on May 30th when the Japanese submarine shows up to French Frigate who did she find anchored there but the sea plane tender ballard. And the skipper from the sub sends his message up the pipeline to Sixth Fleet at Quagelain and says, you know, I got a little problem here and he's advised to wait overnight and hopefully the ballard will go away. Unfortunately the next morning when he raises his periscope not only is the ballard still there but she's been joined by her sister ship the Thornton and now there's a couple of PBYs anchored in the lagoon as well. So this is obviously a place that is under observation and Quagelain at that point scrubs the mission. Well down through the years, you know, this has been one of those fascinating what ifs about the battle and the counterfactual history people have just loved this one and have gotten their teeth into it. And it is sort of a fascinating question, you know, what would have happened if those sea plane had gone over the top of Pearl Harbor. They would not have seen any American carriers there because those carriers had already sortied for the midway battle site and I've seen numerous scenarios during this time that oh well, you know, the Japanese would have been tipped off and Nagumo would have gotten word and, you know, they would have changed his reconnaissance plan, the Japanese would have won the battle, the Japanese would have gone on to win the war and Neil Armstrong would never have landed on the moon. So what's interesting about this though is what the Japanese actually have to say about Operation K and just about two months ago I stumbled across a translation of a section of the Japanese official war history series called Senchi Social talking about Operation K and it was done by this gentleman, Edwin Layton who was one of the midway code breakers and he must have translated this sometime towards the end of his life because Senchi Social didn't come out until the early 1970s but here's what the Japanese have to say about Operation K that even if they had launched this mission as planned and had gone over Pearl Harbor and found no aircraft carriers there, that would in their minds have confirmed their belief at the time that the American carriers were still operating in the South Pacific in the wake of the Battle of Coral Sea which had just happened a month prior. In other words there would have been no tip off Nagumo would not have changed anything and presumably the battle would have gone forward just as it basically did and to me what that points out first of all is that the vast majority of counterfactual history out there is just utter and complete nonsense and a lot of this stuff gets trolled out by forum know-it-alls and other people who want to impress you with their intelligence but actually none of our crystal balls are really all that good when it comes to prognosticating on futures past where we have no real information and so that's one thing that I'm convinced of more pertinently what it points to is the incredible power of preconceived notions the reason I throw that out here is that it's perfectly conceivable that somebody in this room is going to go on to command a carrier battle group say and is going to have to be evaluating very squishy sorts of intelligence based on very sketchy information and given the Japanese mindset before the Battle of Midway a null data point like a non-citing was not going to overturn anybody's apple car to make them change their activities and so what that says is that if you have a piece of null data you must treat it very very carefully it could confirm your pet hypothesis but it might not you know null data is neither good nor bad black nor white yes nor no what null data urges us to do is to widen our set of potential scenarios to accommodate that data point you know the Japanese case of null data point might have meant that those carriers were still operating in the South Pacific but really what it meant is those carriers could be practically anywhere and one of those potential anywheres was potentially off the island of Midway which is what turned out to be true so that ends my contractually mandated teaching moment for this talk we can move on now second thing I want to talk about is the story of the sacrifice of squadrons 8 and 6 which from the American is one of the most poignant and tragic episodes during this entire battle the tactical situation at about 0900 is as follows Nugumo the commander of Kido Butai the Japanese carrier force is aware now that there are American aircraft carriers operating off of the island of Midway and he's determined to close the range on them and launch some sort of a counter strike before he can do that though he's got to bring down the aircraft from the counter strike or the strike that he launched against the island of Midway that morning and so that's what he begins turning his attention to at about 0830 or so and that is going to take about 45 minutes as soon as the last of those aircraft lands on his flight deck it's pretty certain that he would want to go and start spotting his own flight decks with his reserve strike planes then to go after those American carriers but lo and behold at that very moment out of the northeast comes torpedo squadron 8 from the Hornet VT-8 is immediately set upon by the combat air patrol of the Japanese and they are annihilated 15 planes in 15 planes shot down just one guy left alone alive in the water and that takes about 20 minutes or so as soon as that attack is over lo and behold in from the south comes torpedo squadron 6 from the Enterprise and Nugumo again is obligated to turn his tail and run off to the north while his combat air patrol deals with VT-6 which they do in a similarly rough manner and so at the end of this 40 to 45 minutes worth of slaughter which you've got is two American squadrons totally destroyed 37 dead aviators and not a blessed thing to show for it it's an absolute disaster well down through the years the conventional interpretation of these events has always been well yes the sacrifice of those squadrons was tragic but they served a purpose in that they brought the Japanese combat air patrol zeros down to sea level which basically prevented them from getting in the way of the American dive bomber attack that was going to start materializing here in the not too distant future and this is a lovely story except that it's also complete nonsense and the reason it's nonsense has to do with the performance characteristics of this particular plane the Mitsubishi Zero which can climb from sea level to 15,000 feet in about 5 minutes flat so it doesn't take much in the way of mathematical ability to figure out that if VT-8 is totally destroyed by 0937 and VT-6 has been driven out of the area by 10 o'clock and those American dive bombers are not going to be showing up until around 1020 the Zeros had all the time ready to get back up to altitude and most of them probably did and we all understand why it is that we create mythology around these sorts of events particularly sacrificial events if you will because none of us wants to have to look somebody in the eye and say your son or your husband died to no effect these were American war heroes they attacked gallantly and they deserved better than they got so we create mythology around that attack to try to give it meaning it turns out that their attack did have meaning but it's not the one that we typically associate with the books that we've read I mean in simple terms in football parlance if you will VT-8 and VT-6 took 40 minutes off the clock which is almost precisely the amount of time that Admiral Nagumo would have needed to spot his flight decks with aircraft and get them ready to launch and we still don't know whether or not all of those aircraft were actually ready to go there's a lot of debate over whether the torpedo planes were ready to go but the dive bombers certainly would have been and I think it's fair to say that had not VT-6 and VT-8 come in and attacked ineffectual as those attacks were Nagumo probably would have launched a counter strike sometime before the hammer actually came down on him so now let's talk about the hammer coming down and this attack is decisive in every sense of the word because it ends up deciding the outcome of the battle in about a 5 minute time span or so. The tactical situation around 10 o'clock just as VT-6 is being driven out of the area is that now Ketobutai has been sighted by two separate formations of American aircraft neither of whom knows that the other formation is even out there from the southeast you've got coming in a package from the carrier Yorktown comprising their dive bomber squadron, their torpedo squadron and a group of six Wildcats that are riding herd on the torpedo planes and then up from the southwest you have two dive bomber squadrons from the enterprise who are famously following one of the Japanese destroyers back to the main formation this destroyer had been holding the head of an American submarine down long enough for that carrier formation to move past it and is now rejoining Ketobutai and VB-6 and VS-6 basically follow that guy back home so this is what begins developing at about 10 in the morning and what you see happening is VB-3 from Yorktown sort of loops way around to the north and is going to attack Soryu, the enterprise people are coming in from the southwest the formation that the Japanese focus on and see first is VT-3 and if you want to talk about climactic torpedo bomber attacks that really distort the Japanese combat air patrol this is the one because what we see very happening very quickly is that the whole southeast threat vector just fills full of zeros as they first pry off the Wildcat escorts from VT-3 and then go about dissecting the torpedo bomber attack so that is the attack that actually pulls the majority of those zeros out of position and leaves the door open for the dive bombers to come in and do their thing so if we take a look at Enterprise's attack coming in from the southwest it's being run by these two gentlemen Lieutenant Commander Wade McCluskey who is the newly minted Commander of Enterprise Air Group he just took it over a month prior and he is leading a three plane command element that is heading up Scouting Squadron 6 and then behind him comes Lieutenant Richard Best who is the commanding officer of VB-6 the way things should go if everything goes by the book if you've got two squadrons of dive bombers and you've got two fleet carrier targets you want to dedicate one squadron a piece to each of those targets and furthermore you want to use your leading squadron which in this case is Scouting 6 to go after the further target which in this case is a Kagi and lead the trailing squadron to deal with the closer target which would be Kaga reason being if I can dive on those ships more nearly simultaneously I hopefully attain surprise on both of those vessels they don't have the time to maneuver or generate defensive fire and I put more ordnance on target unfortunately something ends up happening and we're still to this day I don't think completely clear on what went down it may have been that both Best and McCluskey were talking at the same time over the single comm circuit that was being used by these squadrons and they just didn't hear each other but the result is that McCluskey leads VS-6 against Kaga as well and spoils Dick Best's dive in VB-6 so what's shaping up is the Kaga is going to get both barrels here and a Kagi is going to get off scot free at least that's what it's looking like and that is a very very bad thing the reason it's a bad thing has mostly to do with this gentleman Lieutenant Commander Marata Shigaharu who is universally acknowledged as the leading torpedo attack practitioner in the Imperial Navy he was the attack leader for the torpedo units at Pearl Harbor it is his men who devastated battleship row his squadron on a Kagi is composed of 100% Pearl Harbor veterans and it's not much of a stretch to say that this is the finest torpedo plane squadron on the planet at this point if a Kagi gets off the hook Marata gets off the hook at about 11 o'clock his squadron is going to go out with Hiryu's dive bomber squadron and they're going to go looking for the American carriers and now yes we've just established the counterfactual history is mostly a bunch of malarkey but hear me out if those two squadrons go after Yorktown and they catch her the odds are that they're going to sink her outright and at that point the battle's kind of a crapshoot it's up in the air and got two carriers on each side who wins you know conceivable the Japanese might walk away with something approaching a victory you know three carriers to two if something like that ends up happening there are going to be people like me standing on the stage 70 years down the road pointing the finger of blame at Wade McCluskey and saying that's the guy who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory because he could not set up an attack according to doctrine you know he'd be the goat but fortunately for everybody that's not going to end up happening. Dick Best has just had his dive spoiled by McCluskey's onset and he manages to pull out in time he manages to grab two other guys from his squadron the rest of his squadron follows McCluskey down and they just you know destroy Kaga but Dick Best has now got three airplanes and he very quickly assesses that I can't let a Kagi get away and he hustles off to the north with his little three plane and they attack a Kagi and the planes come down the bombs come down and one bomb ends up landing about where you see those zeros parked on a Kagi's flight deck and if you do the forensics on the attack three planes in and a rough V formation the bombs also come down in a rough V formation the one in the center is the one that delivers the fatal hit it's pretty clear that Dick Best is the guy who delivers that bomb so at the end of this attack we've got three carriers out of commission at this point and by the end of the afternoon we're going to go out and we're going to find to hear you and we're going to put her under as well and that's pretty much the battle as far as that's concerned game over. The things that this illustrates to me first of all you absolutely have to have smart people in your command billets. I don't want this to be taken as unragging on Wade McCluskey. Wade McCluskey made some absolutely sterling command decisions to put his two squadrons in a position where they could actually deliver that attack. Well done Wade McCluskey. But at the same time command decisions in and of themselves do not put ordinance on target. You got to have operators and so Dick Best makes what I think is the single most important tactical decision in that morning and assessing that we have a problem here that needs to be fixed and then having the incredibly good airmanship to come in and put the bomb where it needs to go. So these two guys really are sort of two sides of the same coin if you will and they are both going to walk away with the Navy Cross and Wade McCluskey is going to retire a rear admiral so good on them but again for our future flag rank people remember the value of having good subordinates underneath because in many cases these people can pull your fat out of the fire. So now I want to talk a little bit about the big picture. Zoom back up to the big picture and examine how midway fits into the scheme of things with respect to the Pacific War. Because down through the years midway has been trotted out as an example of a decisive naval battle along with battles like Salamis or Lepanto or the battle of Tsushima but really how does it stack up in that sense if you sort of take a look at the short-term effects obviously this was a very bad day at the office for the Japanese you know four carriers sunk 3,000 guys KIA 250 planes not a good day at all but what does that really mean one way to evaluate that is to sort of take a look at what I call the carrier score card up to this point of the war. When the war starts both sides have got six big flight decks although two of ours are out in the Atlantic the Japanese have also got five light carriers that they're going to be using for their operation so it's pretty clear that the Japanese have got a little bit of an advantage here in terms of the number of flight decks. By the time we get up to the eve of midway we've lost the carrier Lexington's sunk at Coral Sea Saratoga has a nasty habit of running across enemy submarine torpedoes so she's in the shop. Shokaku and Zuikaku is in the shop as a result of the battle of Coral Sea and they've written off the carrier Shoho and they've gotten the Junyo which is a relatively mediocre converted carrier. You walk out of midway ouch you just lost two thirds of your big flight decks in an afternoon and frankly the four most capable of those flight decks in an afternoon. This is tantamount to a national catastrophe and if we then forward project what's going to happen over the remainder of the war and start factoring in the carrier building programs of these two combatants nothing much is going to change in 1942. The Japanese are going to get Junyo's equally mediocre sister Hio into the mix and we're going to launch the first of our Essex class carriers at the very end of 1942 but then take a look at what happens middle of 1943 and in 1943 middle of 1944 and of 1944 and it's really not until about September of 1944 that the Japanese replaced their midway losses on a unit by unit basis middle of 1945 oh and by the way we built about 124 Jeep carriers as well so here's where you can see that throwing away that trump card of theirs where they had that advantage in flight decks. Throwing that away once it's gone they could never ever get it back because our industrial power just guaranteed that and they really threw that card away probably a year to 18 months before they really even needed to do so. That's a big ouch. Short term effect number two then is by throwing away that trump card they've created a condition of parody in flight decks in the Pacific Ocean and we live in a day and age where the US Navy has been essentially unchallengeable at sea for the last 70 years or so and so clawing your way back to parody does not sound like a very exciting thing. I'm here to tell you in the dark days of 1942 being able to get back to parody was electrifying it was wonderful because what it allowed us to do was get out of this reactive mode where we're constantly being on the defensive and reacting to Japanese blows and we can now begin thinking about how can we take the battle and the war to the enemy. So if you think really big picture I think any discussion of strategy in World War two is predicated to a large extent on this graph which shows us the GDP of the major combatant nations and in particular if you look at US versus Japan what you see is we came into this war with a GDP that is five and a half times larger than Japan's and we're going to exit the war with an economy that's eight times larger and not only that but in terms of population and automobile manufacturing and raw material production you know coal, steel, bauxite anything you care to name we've got it just all over the Japanese we have a crushing superiority and that I think gives us the ability to then evaluate whether or not this battle is decisive because it reminds the image of a decisive battle is that it is also going to decide the course of the larger conflict that the loser of that battle is going to lose the war the winner of that battle is going to win the war and yet I think you can see from the foregoing that even if America had lost at midway as horrible as that would have been we are still going to win this war that by late 1944 we are going to come out with our brand navy and we are going to crush the Japanese and there's just nothing that they can really do about that so I think it's very difficult to reconcile the concept of a decisive battle within the context of a war whose outcome is kind of preordained and I'm not the first guy to say this you know HP Wilmot points out that the American victory in the Pacific might have been inevitable the American victory at midway might have been decisive but not both of these statements can be true and so I'm very much in the camp that says that given the economic disparities that were functioning here we're going to win this war so great we're going to win this war but here we are in the middle of 1942 and you know just being able to whip out our checkbooks and saying well we have a larger checkbook that does not mean that we get to win we actually have to fight these guys and up until this point this war has actually been relatively episodic in nature for us yes there's been some ground combat going on in the Philippines we've had a couple of naval battles they haven't been terribly large we've launched some carrier raids around the perimeter but we're not in a position at this point where we are in constant contact with the Japanese and at the beginning of the war that was good for us because we were so horribly disorganized that you know we didn't want this war to be an intensive war we wanted to just buy some time that we could be organizing but now in the middle of 42 you know the productive spigots are beginning to turn on and if you're the bigger more powerful opponent you want as much as possible to get your smaller weaker opponent in a position where you can begin using attrition on them the metaphor I use is a sausage grinder you know I want to be some place in the Pacific where every single day I am killing Japanese soldiers I am shooting down their airplanes I've got a high probability of damaging or destroying some of their naval vessels because even despite the economic disparity here Japan is still a large powerful modern industrialized nation and the only way to beat a country like that is to subject it to tremendous levels of cumulative attrition that just grind up and destroy their military that's what you have to do to win this war and so really you know our to-do list for 42 is really very simple you know get the Japanese headlock somewhere and it doesn't even really matter where and just start giving them the business that's what we need to do and lo and behold the Japanese give that to us in not one place but two within two months of our having one at Midway the first is that they land troops on the northern shore of New Guinea and begin marching across the Owen Stanley mountains to try to lay siege to the port of Port Moresby and coast of New Guinea and that's going to bring the Australians in very quickly and pretty soon there will be an American division in there as well and that's going to kick off a campaign in New Guinea that basically lasts to the end of the war. More importantly right about at the same time that Midway was going down we became aware that the Japanese were intending on moving forces down through the Solomon Islands so that they could begin threatening supply lines that run through places like Fiji and Samoa and down into the eastern coast of Australia. Australia is very very important to us and not surprisingly we reacted to that very vigorously and at the beginning of August of 1942 we put a division of Marines into Guadalcanal to take away that airfield and that's going to kick off a campaign that's going to last for the better part of five months and it is here off Guadalcanal in this constant series of naval battles that develop over time and also a number of fairly big land battles as well. This is the sausage grinder. This is exactly what the US needed in order to really start stoking up attrition because in the course of this campaign the Japanese are going to lose hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of airplanes. They're going to lose tens of thousands of soldiers. Dozens of ships sunk, dozens more damaged. This is exactly the sort of attritional warfare model that we needed to be applying to the Japanese in order to win that war. So when I look at midway I very much would agree that midway is the most important single naval battle in the Pacific. Not because it was decisive in an outright sense but because what it did to our short term military options. It very much was a turning point because it ended one phase of the war, brought the curtain down on that and then led us into the next phase of the war that lets us create the kind of war we need in order to beat the Japanese. Last thing I'd like to do is just spend a couple minutes talking about the human dimension here that I have no doubt that there are a number of people in the audience who are quite familiar with the cockpit of an aircraft like the F-18. Just for a few moments think about what it would be like to go into battle in the cockpit of an airplane like a Dauntless Dive Bomber. We live in a day and age where I imagine a lot of us probably can't get to the grocery store in back without our phone whispering sweet nothings in our ear and telling us how to get there. There was none of that in 1942. There's no satellites. There's barely any radar on the ships certainly none in the planes. Two guys climbed into the cockpit of this thing and were basically told, fly over that away. We think they're over there someplace. Go find the Japanese fleet and bomb them. Their navigational aids were a ruler, a compass, and a little paper chart that was small enough that you could fit on a clipboard. A lot of them didn't have training even on the high frequency radio homing devices that they were supposed to use to get back to their own carriers. They didn't know how to use the equipment. And not surprisingly a lot of these guys didn't get back. That took real courage to make that happen. And so as we leave today and go off to our comfortable homes and our refresh and malted beverages, please remember to raise your glass this evening to the men of the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps and the United States Army Air Forces whose skill and bravery and willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice have called upon one for us, the great victory that we remember 72 years today. Thank you so much. Do we want to do any Q&A? If anybody wants to ask anything, I don't know how I'm going to possibly hear you, sir. Lieutenant Commander Rob Riley, seminar two. You had the question mark up there about the Battle of Windway. Is that in reference to the current activities that are happening around the world drawing us to the Pacific? No, that was more meant to just... I wanted to make people stop and think about the phrase turning point. It's one of those phrases that we just kind of toss out there without even thinking and so the basic goal was to just make you think about was this really a turning point and I hope I have answered that, yeah, Midway really was a turning point in the Pacific war. Sir, Admiral. Question is what new information did Tony and I have as a stimulus to write this book? The basic deal is that for the first 65 years the history of this battle has been told mostly from American sources and there was a trio of Japanese sources that had been translated into English over that time. One of them was the captured battle report of Admiral Nogumo. The second was a series of interviews that were done by Japanese officers after the war. The third was a book written by a guy named Mitsuo Fuchida who was the attack leader at Pearl Harbor. He was also at Midway. He wrote a book called Midway, the battle that doomed Japan. Those three sources sort of formed the canon, if you will, of the Japanese source material that had been translated into English. It turns out that Fuchida was not telling the truth about some of the things that happened at Midway and Tony and I, my co-author, became aware of some of these things when we started looking at some of the newer translations of the Japanese air group records which had just become available in English. One of the things we noticed was that the Japanese air group records are telling us that, man, there's an awful lot of cap activity going on in these flight decks leading up to the climactic dive bomber attack at 1020. Fuchida's story is that, well, at the time that the Americans attacked us we were this close to being ready to go. That our flight decks were festooned with aircraft that were just minutes away from being ready to take off and counter strike of the Americans and, oh my god, you know, the gods of war sweep down and they take it away from us. It turns out that that's not true, that actually all of those attack planes were still in the hangars at that point in time. And the reason they were in the hangars is because the flight decks were busy with cap evolutions. These were straight deck carriers that didn't have an angled flight deck and so you could only be doing one thing at a time. You could be landing aircraft, you could be spotting aircraft, you could be launching aircraft and if I'm recovering aircraft I know that the fan tail of my carrier has got to be shut down for recovery operations. If therefore I can show you that at 1010, 10 minutes before she gets bombed Akagi has recovered a trio of fighters, I can make some pretty definite conclusions that you know what, those attack planes were no way spotted on the fan tail of Akagi because I know she was bringing down aircraft. So the big picture answer is there were some new Japanese sources that had become available that we were very interested in and they ended up telling an entirely different story. Anybody else? Sir? Yeah, the question is was there any way for the Japanese to really play their hand in such a way that they could come out with a win in the Pacific War? Obviously it's technically it's unknowable. I was just at a dinner last night and I shared some other slides with some people of the naval order and it's interesting if you look at some of the quotes from Admiral Yamamoto during the planning operations this would be about the April May timeframe, it's clear that even though the Japanese are riding a tide of victory, Yamamoto is very nervous and he says to his staff officers before this set of war games, it's important for you guys to understand that we're not going to get any more surprise operations and or rather that the enemy is going to be alerted to us, it's going to be a much tougher fight you have to understand that America has five to ten times our armaments capability and that therefore the only way we can win this war is to play a very up-tempo game, keep our ops tempo high and just keep hitting them as hard as we can, as often as we can. I think what he's going there for is our morale. That's the only lever that he can see that if we potentially will throw in the towel soon enough, if we just beat the Americans up bad enough that they just say screw it, I don't care about the Dutch East Indies, take it fine that might get us to throw in the towel but it's got to happen really fast. Personally though given the way that the Japanese began the war with a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor anytime you see an image of the battleship Arizona burning, that is the image that is seared on every American's consciousness during this portion of the war. They want revenge on Japan and I think that the Japanese have absolutely guaranteed for themselves that the political will is going to be there for the duration just by the way that they started off that war so I don't really see a lot of opportunities for Japan to win this war. I think you could make a very credible argument that the Japanese lost this war as soon as the first bomb fell on Pearl Harbor. That's it. We're going to crush you. Anybody else? Sir? Good afternoon sir. Commander Stavridis for all Australian Navy. In your book do you cover Chester Nimitz's decision which I think is quite a brave decision to take on the superior Kido Butai Force when his strategic guidance from FDR was certainly Atlantic first was not to get into any decisive battles. I'm sorry I didn't understand the question at the end. Chester Nimitz's strategic guidance from FDR as I understand it was not to get into any decisive battles and especially with midway where he was certainly the weak of force, his decision to actually go ahead. Yeah let me talk about that. Admiral King actually issues some instructions to Nimitz who then issues them to his commander's Fletcher and Spruance. What Nimitz tells his task force commanders is as follows. He says this battle has got to be fought according to the principle of calculated risk. You are not to expose your carrier forces to the enemy unless you think you can do disproportionate damage to those forces in return. In the underlying context there is hey you know what if you guys get yourselves in a bad situation and you don't think you can win this thing, do not fight down to the last bloody rowboat, pull out, go back home and let the marines face up to an invasion. I guess that's what we always do to marines right? And so I think Nimitz had a very fine appreciation for the odds there. One of the things about this battle in terms of the hagiography or the mythology the two most popular books on this battle I would argue are Walter Lord's incredible victory and Prang's Miracle of Midway and the titles of both of those books tell you a lot about the American mindset around the odds that faced us during this battle. Little known fact but Nimitz was actually willing to go into the battle with only two carriers. If he had not been able to repair Yorktown and get her back into service even though his intel people are telling him that the Japanese may bring as many as five to the party he was still willing to go after them with two. That's he darned aggressive. But again he's given his carrier commanders the ability to make their own decision as to what their odds are of inflicting good damage. If the odds were not good bring those carriers home. We've got other usages for them. And that stands in market contrast I think to Admiral Yamaguchi who during the afternoon the Japanese have lost those first three carriers. They've only got here you left at this point right? Well if you were an American commander and had just seen three quarters of your fleet blown apart. Yes you would probably have counter attacked but you would have placed here you at the extreme edge of her operational air range because you know that her air power is going to go down into a downward cycle at some point right? I want to hit these guys I'm going to hit them as long as I can hit them but as soon as I don't have any offensive firepower man I'm going to head for the exit so I'm going to bring that ship home. That is not what Admiral Yamaguchi did. He closed the range on the Americans the entire afternoon and that speaks I think to two very different mindsets between the Americans and the Japanese in this battle is how they approached it. Thank you. Anybody else? Sir. Could the Japanese have attained their political aims without attacking Pearl Harbor? That is one of those again unknowable questions. There's a really interesting book that just came out by a woman named Ari Hota who writes about the Japanese decisions in the higher policymaking circles of Japan leading up to the war because counter factually one of the favorite scenarios that gets trotted out a lot is well why did you guys declare war on America at all? Just leave the Philippines alone, don't attack Pearl Harbor, go after the British and the Dutch and take away their stuff and leave the Americans alone because that obviously would have created a real political problem for FDR. How do I get a declaration of war against these guys that they haven't actually attacked me and domestic opinion certainly doesn't want to be seen as supporting British colonialism. We're not going to defend Singapore if we haven't been attacked. The problem is that it's not really politicians that are calling the shots in Japan at this point in time it's military leaders and no classically trained military leaders are going to leave the Philippines un-reduced in the event of a war because it's like a knife pointed at your supply lines running back from the southern resource area. So as soon as you make the determination well the Philippines have got to go well now you're in a war against America and that then gives Yamamoto the opportunity to say well if we were going to fight the Americans I for absolutely sure want to attack Pearl Harbor to take the Pacific fleet out of the equation. So again I don't know that they would have done that just because the wrong people were kind of calling the shots in Japan at the time. Thank you guys so much for your time and attention I really appreciate it.