The Roundtable
Forum
Official
Newsletter of the Battle of Midway
Roundtable
Issue Number
2011-18
5 August
2011 •
Our 14th Year
~
AROUND THE TABLE ~
MEMBERS’
TOPICS IN THIS ISSUE:
1. The Roundtable’s Oldest Message
2. Book Review: Attack on Pearl Harbor
3. Video Review: Days That Shook the World: the Battle of Midway
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1. THE ROUNDTABLE’S OLDEST MESSAGE
Ed.
note: the recent articles concerning CAPT Frank DeLorenzo
got me to searching our archives for messages from or about him, and in the
process I discovered what appears to be the oldest Battle of Midway Roundtable
message that anyone has retained.
Originally distributed to members via Bill Price’s e-mail circular, the
message was forwarded to me some time ago from Ralph Brading in Australia. The subject matter is the upcoming BOM
symposium, held in 1998 at Pensacola.
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15 September 1997
From: CAPT Frank L. “DeLo” DeLorenzo, USN-Ret
Hey guys:
This appeared in this morning's
copy of the Pensacola New Journal.
I thought you might be interested.
[Quote]
AMERICAN, JAPANESE ON MIDWAY
PANEL.
Aviators to share experiences
at Naval symposium
U.S. and Japanese aviators
fought on different sides in the Battle of Midway, but they'll be on the same
panel at next year's National Museum of Naval Aviation symposium.
Two former Japanese aviators,
Takesi Maeda and Taisuke Maruyama, will speak through an interpreter about
their experiences in the battle, at the museum's 12th annual symposium
scheduled for May 6 to 8. The two
fought at Midway and also dropped torpedoes at Pearl Harbor in World War II.
Retired U.S. aviators, Cmdr Richard
Best, LCOL Lloyd F. Childers and Capt. Albert K. Earnest and RADM William H.
Leonard also will discuss the battle.
Most of the symposium events
are open to the public.
"The United States Navy
realizes that the battle was the most important battle the Navy has ever
had," said retired Capt. E. Earle Rogers II, museum vice president for
education. "We're fortunate to get
some panelists who actually flew in the battle."
This is the second time the
Battle of Midway, the first decisive U.S. Navy victory over the Japanese in
World War II, has been highlighted in the annual symposium. In 1988, former American and Japanese
aviators spoke about the battle.
The museum has invited Adm. Jay
L. Johnson, Chief of Naval Operations to the symposium's closing banquet, but
he has not confirmed whether he'll attend.
He attended this year's symposium, which included Apollo astronauts Neil
Armstrong, Wally Schirra, James Lovell, Alan Shepard and Eugene Cernan.
Cernan, the last man to have
walked on the moon, will moderate a session, "one Day in a Long War,10 May
1972, Air War, North Vietnam."
The symposium also will include
a panel of top Navy officials who will speak about the status of Naval aviation.
[Unquote]
Hope to see you gents there!!!
DeLo
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2. BOOK REVIEW: ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR ( see issue #15 )
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17 July 2011
From: Brig. Gen. William L. Shields, USAF-Ret
Arizona
Nice job on The Attack on Pearl Harbor. I wonder if Yamamoto ever wrote or said
anything for the record after Pearl Harbor about how the results comported with
his pre-raid objective. It would
provide an interesting check on Zimm's thesis.
Of course Yamamoto didn't have long to do this.
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19 July 2011
From: Ian W. Toll
California
author, Six Frigates;
Pacific Crucible: War At Sea In the Pacific, 1941-1942
Yamamoto was apparently very pleased by the news that eight American battleships
were knocked out of action, though aware that at least some would be returned
to service. He was surprised that the
Japanese fleet lost no ships and only about 30 planes. That result was better than he or his staff
had hoped for. Having had such
one-sided success in the initial attack, he and most of his staff apparently
faulted Nagumo for not launching another round of strikes aimed at taking out
the shore-support facilities and oil tanks, but Yamamoto also overruled
suggestions that he should order Nagumo (then withdrawing) to return and launch
follow-up strikes, on the grounds that a commander on the spot should be given
the scope to make his own tactical decisions.
Ugaki (Yamamoto’s chief of staff) was critical of Nagumo in his diary. The decision to withdraw after two attack
waves was “sneak-thievery and contentment with a humble lot in life.” He remarked that were he (Ugaki) in Nagumo’s
position, he would “be prepared to expand the war result to the extent of
completely destroying Pearl Harbor.”
(Ugaki, Fading Victory, pp. 46-50)
It is also interesting to note that Yamamoto was apparently very
disappointed and angry that the declaration of war was not delivered in
Washington prior to the raid. He had
been assured that the foreign ministry would deliver that notice to Secretary
Hull at least 30 minutes before the initial attack. He was also disappointed that the midget submarines had not
escaped Pearl Harbor, and said that had he known the air raid would be so
successful, he would not have allowed the midget sub mission.
More broadly, the officers around him remarked that Yamamoto was
“gloomy” and “pessimistic” even during the early weeks of the war, when Japan
was on the rampage. He often warned
that the war would be long and that the eventual allied counterattack would be
formidable.
After the American carrier raids of January-March 1942, Yamamoto
concluded that the absence of the carriers from Pearl on December 7th was the
outstanding failure of the raid, and backed the Midway offensive chiefly as a
means of forcing the carriers into a pitched naval battle in which they might
be destroyed.
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22 July 2011
From: CDR Alan D. Zimm, USN-Ret
Maryland
author, Attack on Pearl
Harbor: Strategy, Combat, Myths, Deceptions
In the context of
the times, I think that it is very difficult to come up with exactly what
Yamamoto was expecting in his heart-of-hearts. No one had used aircraft
on the scale intended to be used at Pearl Harbor, and I think that there was a
wide range of expectations regarding the anticipated results—Genda, very
optimistic, expecting close to a clean sweep of all the priority targets
(battleships and cruisers); the Naval General Staff [NGS] less optimistic,
actually fearful that Kido Butai might be destroyed. In reading from
Yamamoto, his objective was to sink a battleship, perhaps a few. He felt
that the battleship held a special place in the American public’s and
government’s perception of what constituted sea power, and that sinking a
battleship would destroy the Americans’ will to fight. You see this
objective reflected in the briefing given to the torpedo bomber aviators before
the attack: they were given the contradictory objectives of applying sinking
hits against their targets, while hitting as many battleships as
possible. Their objectives, and a very complicated prioritization scheme
that was presumably briefed to the leadership, was impossible to execute—the
torpedo bombers would be coming in on the deck, low and slow, in an attack that
was to last less than 90 seconds, so figuring out who had hit what target
before an aircraft selected its own target was clearly impossible.
Another consideration
is that Yamamoto and the NGS both anticipated losing at least half the Japanese
carriers. There simply was no way, in their calculations and wargames,
that the aircraft that they had available to hit the estimated 600 U.S.
aircraft on the island ought to have prevented all counterattacks.
Yamamoto was setting up a “carriers for battleships” swap which, in the context
of the times, probably looked good to him. Yamamoto wanted a strike on
U.S. morale, and then the fall of the Philippines and Singapore. At that
point he wanted the U.S. to be brought to the negotiating tables, before any
counterattack could be mustered
I really doubt that
there were any discussions regarding expanding the attack to shore facilities
or to the fuel tanks. Genda was asked about that very point by the
executive secretary of the USNI, and “He replied ingenuously that nobody had
thought of this target.” The idea that a strike against the shipyard or
the fuel tanks would have caused a huge effect in the course and outcome of the
war came from U.S., and it was not until postwar when Fuchida heard these
stories that he came up with the tales about how perspicacious he was in
proposing third wave attacks, “if they only had listened to me ….” When
Fuchida was interviewed immediately post-war by the Strategic Bombing Survey,
he made no mention of the shipyards or fuel tanks or recommending a third wave
attack. Genda had run the numbers in his planning process, and had
concluded that there simply were not enough bombs to do a proper job. A principle that he established for the
attack is that it was better to do crippling damage against a few significant
targets than to do light damage to a broad range of targets.
I suspect that it
is necessary to consider Japanese psychology when looking at their
accounts. I have detected a very strong tendency not to trash their
great, signal victory of the beginning of the war. Pride and face are
involved.
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3. VIDEO REVIEW: DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD:
THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY
Ed.
note: this video first
appeared in 2006 and was reviewed in issue #37 for
that year. It was seen by many viewers
for the first time last week when it was re-run by the PBS station in the San
Francisco area. Here’s a fresh review
by one of our members who caught that broadcast. The writer, Van Harvey, was a junior officer aboard a destroyer
in WW2 and is a retired Stanford University professor.
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1 August 2011
From: Van A. Harvey
California
It was a one hour long BBC production produced by Lion Television and
the History Channel. Thanks were given,
among others, to Jonathan Parshall (of Shattered Sword fame). It was announced as a "dramatized
reconstruction," a combination of archival footage and scenes with live
actors.
Most of the film is devoted to a chronological narrative of the
battle. After a 10-minute section on background—oddly, no attention is
given to Yamamoto—the film then turns to the June 4 battle itself: the first
spotting of the Japanese fleet by the PBY, the 0430 strike on Midway, films of the attack by John Ford, the call for
a second strike on Midway, Nagumo's dilemma, the attack by Waldron and VT-8,
the discovery of the fleet by the Enterprise fliers, and the bombing by
LT Best and his squadron. The account
of the battle switches back and forth
between scenes from Nagumo's point of view and that of Spruance with
times indicated: from 0430 to 1700 and the sinking of the Hiryu. I thought this was the best part of the
program.
There are one or two attempts to give an emotional touch to the battle; for example, having Waldron's last
letter to his wife received and read by her, and there is a brief shot of an
elderly Best making a statement about the battle being revenge for Pearl
Harbor.
On the whole, I think it was a fairly straightforward if not a thorough
account of the battle. But it did have
the virtue of avoiding some of the myths which you and others have
dispelled. For example, we do not have
any reference to Nagumo being caught with all of his planes on the flight decks. Also, there is a subtle debunking of the Gay
story of floating amidst the battle, because the film only shows Gay floating
on a life preserver with two black towers of smoke way off on the horizon.
I noticed that there is no mention of the controversy on the Hornet
over course 265 or 240 degrees, and there is nothing said about Stanhope Ring’s
"flight to nowhere." Nor is anything said about the Army bombers
from Midway. Everything tends to be
concentrated on the experience of VT-8 and Best’s VB-6. It gives Best rather than McClusky credit for
sighting the Japanese ship which the squadron then followed to the carriers,
and it gives Best the credit not only for hitting the Akagi but also the
Kaga.
There are some interesting touches: for example, Yamaguchi's outrage
over Nagumo's delay in launching everything he had against the American
carriers rather than waiting until he could put together both torpedo planes
and fighters. It also credits Yamaguchi
with taking the initiative in sinking the Yorktown, but also being
mistaken in thinking after the second strike that he had sunk a second carrier.
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~ NOW
HEAR THIS! ~
NEWS
& INFO IN THIS ISSUE:
- Featured Link
- Editor’s Notes
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FEATURED LINK
Roundtable member CDR Harry Ferrier, USN-Ret, is well known
in the history of the BOM for being aboard the only VT-8 TBF to make it back to
Midway as the air-sea battle began.
Here’s a YouTube video of an on-camera interview with Ferrier, in which
he offers some poignant personal feeling about his experience as one of VT-8’s
other “sole survivors.” (Try to ignore
the frequent irrelevant clips from the John Ford movie.)
Click
here for the featured link.
For more about CDR Ferrier including “then” and “now”
photos, click here.
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EDITOR’S NOTES
~ Thanks to James
Leffler for the above YouTube video on Harry Ferrier. Here’s another one from him that you should find of interest: a
mini-documentary on all of the fleet carriers from all nations that were sunk
during the war. It only runs about six
and a half minutes, so it doesn’t include the small carriers like Shoho,
Gambier Bay, etc.: click
here.
~ SOC pilot and BOM vet
Phil Horne is the latest addition to the Veterans Photos pages on our web
site. Click here to check
out Phil’s new page.
~ For the few BOM vets on our roster for whom
we don’t yet have a photo page—send me a brief biography and at least one good
digital photo of yourself in recent times, and I’ll be happy to add you to the
gallery. A picture of yourself from the
WW2 era would also be especially welcome.
~ Here’a a link to a new WW2 history book, The
Storm of War by British author Andrew Roberts. I haven’t read it, but it’s said to include
substantial coverage of the BOM. Since
Mr. Roberts is unknown to me, it will be interesting to learn of his treatment
of the battle without the benefit of the Roundtable’s resources. If anyone has or gets this book, please send
in a review.
~ I appreciate the many
Facebook “friend” invitations sent by members to the Roundtable’s e-mail
address, but I don’t intend to expand our on-line presence beyond what we
already have, at least not yet. I may
reconsider when and if I can be persuaded that a Facebook profile for the
Roundtable would be particularly supportive of our goals.