The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) Read Free

the theater boundary between Nimitz’s and MacArthur’s commands one degree (sixty miles) to the west in order to put Guadalcanal within Nimitz’s theater. As a result of that decision, on August 7, just two months after the Battle of Midway, ten thousand U.S. Marines went ashore on Guadalcanal to seize the airfield (which they named for Major Lofton Henderson, the martyred VMSB-241 commander at Midway) and to inaugurate what turned into a savage fourteen-month campaign of attrition.
    During those fourteen months, American soldiers and Marines fought their way westward from Guadalcanal to other places with exotic names: Rendova, Kolombangara, Vella Lavella, and Bougainville. The Japanese fought ferociously, but they lost more than they could afford in a futile defense of these sparsely populated jungle outposts. In their prewar plan, their defense of the empire’s perimeter was supposed to diminish the American battle fleet as it moved westward. Like a wave running up a sloping beach, the Americans would lose power and momentum as they advanced. Instead, the longer the campaign lasted, the stronger American forces became.
    In May 1943, the new-construction carrier USS Essex (CV-9) joined the Pacific fleet, the first of an eventual twenty-four ships of her class. The foolishness of the Japanese decision to launch a war against an industrial juggernaut like the United States was thus fully revealed. The second Essex -class carrier had been prospectively named the Bonhomme Richard in honor of John Paul Jones’s flagship during the American Revolution, but after Midway she was rechristened Yorktown (CV-10). The existence of two carriers both named Yorktown still causes confusion for some students of the Second World War, but there is something symbolic about it. Three times the Japanese believed that they had sunk the Yorktown: once in the Coral Sea and twice at Midway. Even after she finally succumbed, she reemerged again only months later in a newer and bigger form. To the Japanese, the Americans must have seemed like the mythical Hydra, which grew two new heads whenever one was decapitated.
    For their part, the Japanese never recovered from the loss of the four big fleet carriers sunk at Midway. They simply did not have the industrial capacity to produce a score of new carriers in the midst of war. Even more critically, Japan never recovered from the loss of so many of her airplanes and trained carrier pilots. The battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, and especially the grinding Solomons campaign claimed hundreds of frontline aircraft and the lives of a disproportionate number of her frontline pilots. Genda Minoru later observed despondently, “One after another, our best pilots were lost, and green, inexperienced men came in as replacements.” The Japanese had no option but to rely on these young and untested pilots who, however earnest and determined, lacked the training, and especially the experience, of their predecessors. 7
    By the time the Solomons campaign came to an end in the fall of 1943, the United States boasted seven new Essex-class aircraft carriers whose hanger decks were packed with a thousand new planes from American factories, and which were manned by thousands of new pilots who streamed out of American training programs. In November of 1943, the United States began an island-hopping campaign that led them to the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Marianas, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and finally to the very doorstep of Japan’s home islands. The Japanese continued to fight courageously, and they inflicted heavy casualties, but they never succeeded in halting the American advance. In hindsight, it is evident that the course of the war—and with it the course of history—had tilted on the fulcrum of the Battle of Midway.

    Chester Nimitz remained as CinCPac for the duration of the war and directed the Pacific campaign right up to the signing of the instrument of surrender on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo