SPEAKER_02: What you're about to hear is part four of a multi-part series on the war in Asia and the Pacific area between about 1931 and 1945. If you like your stories in some sort of linear order and you haven't heard the earlier segments, you might want to catch up by checking those out first. If you don't care or you heard those already, well, then this is Supernova in the East, part four.
SPEAKER_04: It's history. It's hardcore history.
SPEAKER_02: There's a very wonderful and squishy question in play in both world wars, especially. I can hear some people in the back of my head saying it's always been in play since the beginning of time, but certainly because of maybe the increase in the pace of change and whatnot. You see it in stark relief in both world wars, but it has to do with the difference between quantifiable war elements versus unquantifiable war elements. And this is not to say that one is more important than the other, but one is much more subject to proof and testing than the other. We had said earlier that the early parts of this conflict are the acid test of combat, the rubber meets the road moment for a lot of the pre-war promises about these ships and these aircraft and all these land-based systems and ideas, both tactics and strategy and equipment, where we get to see if all the hype before a conflict breaks out lives up to it once conflict does. The good news about something like that is that is quantifiable evidence. If that airplane sucks and doesn't live up to the potential and the promise, you'll know it quickly. And you'll be able to use what doesn't work to help make something that does later. But the other side to the conflict and its goals, much harder to measure. And if you can't measure it, how do you know if it's working or not? How do you know if you should keep doing it or not? If somebody really wants to keep doing it, really believes it, that might be a plus, right? Not being able to prove it one way or the other, but it has to do with the question of morale. Morale, of course, is a psychological state, isn't it? So right now we're in the realm of harder to pin down and harder to say that what applies to person a will apply to person B necessarily. But morale is one of those things that on a tactical level, on a battlefield level, is undeniably huge. And they've been writing about it, military strategists, since the Bronze Age. The idea is not to kill everybody on a battlefield. Traditionally, it's to kill enough people to break their will to continue fighting, right? To destroy their morale, killing as a means to an end. Nobody denies this. What is interesting, though, is to try to extrapolate what applies and that is, if not provable, then demonstrable, right? You might not be able to prove it in a laboratory, but it's been shown to be true enough times, you could say reliably, right? Morale is the most important thing on a tactical battlefield. Is it the most important thing on a strategic one? Does it apply to whole nation states? Can you break their morale? This is an open question in the Second World War. Some people say you can, some people say you can't. Some people say you can, but only if you do it this way. Some people say you can, but only if you do it that way. What breaks a nation's morale? And what proof do you have that that's something that even occurs? Much of the justification for some of the bombing that's going to be done from the air on cities and populations in cities is based on this idea that you will get them to, you know, petition their governments and say we must have peace now we can't be bombed anymore. These are, you know, we've done whole multi hour discussions on this in the past, but but this is part of the the interwar years of aerial development and theory on how aircraft are going to be these great peacemakers sometimes because very few people are going to be able to do that. Very quickly the populations will tell their governments, you know, you better get a peace deal going right now. We're not going to put up with this. And then the Germans bomb places like London and the evidence seems to contradict that 180 degrees. The people in London and Britain weren't ready to give in because they were being bombed. They were pissed off. Now does this mean that it doesn't work? No, it means that the jury is still out, right? We're not bombing enough. We're not bombing with the right kinds of bombs, the right kinds of planes. Now the technology hasn't caught up with theory yet. I mean, there are still people that think once we use these nuclear weapons, we can finally get that morale question working at the grand strategy level the way designed. And by the way, when Germany at the end of the war was bombed to rubble, they finally saw something more akin to numbness creeping into the population rather than a sense that, you know, they wanted the war to end at all costs or that they were ready to give in that it made you more likely to surrender. At the very, very end, I think they may have seen some of that. But by that point, you already destroyed all the industry in Germany. So why did it I mean, you didn't bomb them for morale reasons, then you just leveled them. And if you want to say it worked, okay, but let's be honest about why. The problem is, is that because we know morale is important at some level, and in this war, because you could make up anything you want about how it's important to giant level, how much effort do you put into it? One thing you can say is that morale has a connection to fear. Now fear doesn't necessarily mean you don't want to fight. And if you bomb my city, I might not be willing to give into you because I might be angrier than I was before at you, but I might be afraid. Although sometimes, you know, scared people are the most dangerous thing you can ever run into, you can have a very benign coin size spider in your hotel room up in the corner. And you can know that this is not a venomous spider that can hurt you. But what percentage of people if you can't get that spider peacefully out of your hotel room are going to have to kill that spider before they can fall asleep with any peace and comfort. Because, you know, you never know. There have been Native American massacres predicated on little more than this idea, by the way. Years before the Second World War, when American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was running for president during the Great Depression, he had a slogan. We have nothing to fear but fear itself. About 10 years later, in the middle of the Second World War, when the US has been involved for three months, not the kind of phrase you could probably get away with saying, not after Pearl Harbor, and a drumbeat of losses initially that are as bad or worse than I've seen Americans have to absorb in their history. I'm not sure there's a comparable time, maybe sometime in the Civil War, maybe sometime in the Revolutionary War. But, you know, Pearl Harbor is 9-11 from a psychological and morale standpoint and from a sense of injustice standpoint. But at the same time, it's also a military disaster that cripples your ability to respond to the perpetrators of the attack, right? And if you're the President of the United States, you have to bolster the morale of the nation, you have to dampen its fear, and you have to rally it towards the cause. Franklin Roosevelt is a controversial figure to some Americans because some Americans don't like his policies even today. But as a war leader, he was inspirational, and as a politician, he was masterful. There's a reason that there's a law now saying you can only be President for two terms. Because some of Roosevelt's detractors worry that if his health hadn't failed, he'd still be President today at 147 years old or something. His style was different than someone like Churchill's. Churchill was a guy who you thought was ready to take off his coat and get in the mud and wrestle with Hitler. He's a bulldog. He's a come and get it, you know, that kind of, I mean, different politicians have different personas and ways that they present themselves. FDR couldn't do that. I mean, this is a man in a wheelchair. He's not going to give you that alpha male tough guy sort of routine. He's got a different feel to him. If I had to describe it, he reminds me kind of alike. You know, Woodrow Wilson was a little this way too, but you get a feeling like Roosevelt would be a little bit more physical even in a wheelchair than Woodrow Wilson. But it's this sort of preacher, Yankee preacher looking down his nose and scolding while he shakes the Bible at you, just almost like a moral indignation and a righteous anger. You will get yours, sir. Something like that. It's very effective though, and it also sounds like you're definitely coming from the higher, higher plane in terms of morality. It's a presentation that in its own way works and you rarely saw, you know, Roosevelt had this wonderful way about him where he seems calm and sometimes funny and everything, but he doesn't have to change that tone and add much anger at all for him to sound absolutely livid. You can see how effective Roosevelt is at this, by the way. If you listen to some of the addresses that he did to the American people, he had these things that were known as fireside chats where he would speak on the new technology of radio directly to the American people as though they were in, he was in the home with them. He's the first president to have been able to use mass communication in any way, shape or form like that. It would be as if the president today at his own Twitter account and could communicate with Americans directly. One of the most important ones that he ever gave was delivered on February 23rd, 1942. This is six weeks or so before Bataan falls. But Roosevelt knows it's going to. He knows the American people have already been through the worst series of bad news events that they've probably ever been through. And he knows the worst is yet to come. Maybe it'll be one of the biggest surrenders in US history. How do you get out in front of an issue as they say in Washington or be proactive about something like that while still bolstering morale, fighting spirit and all that kind of stuff? And how do you whip the people back up into a frenzy? I mean, there's a lot at stake in that speech. 60 million people, by the way, or more will hear it during an era where the American population was half of what it is now. So these are basically Super Bowl type numbers tuning in. And if you go listen to it, it's not like a short little thing. It's like 35 minutes of Roosevelt talking to you. And like I said, like he's in your home, he'll say, please get out your maps and follow along. He couches this entire affair this time as a report to the American people. And he goes after conspiracy theories that say that the government's been hiding the real losses in everything from you. So he literally lays out, you know, we have this many dead with it was interesting speech to listen to. But what he also has to do, like we said, get get out in front of this issue. So first, he basically says things are not as bad as you heard. We're giving better than we're getting. But he has to acknowledge losses and at the same time turn it around into something where, you know, the light is at the end of the tunnel and we're going to turn this around. And he does so in that speech on February 23, 1942. Here's a sample of it.
SPEAKER_01: We have most certainly suffered losses from Hitler's U-boats in the Atlantic, as well as from the Japanese in the Pacific. And we shall suffer more of them before the turn of the tide. But speaking for the United States of America, let me say once and for all to the people of the world, we Americans have been compelled to yield ground, but we will regain it. We and the other United Nations are committed to the destruction of the militarism of Japan and Germany. We are daily increasing our strength. Soon we and not our enemies will have the offensive. We, not they, will win the final battle. And we, not they, will make the final peace.
SPEAKER_02: So that's inspirational on one level. And he's setting the stage for, you know, there's going to be bad things still to come. And then he gets into the question of, you know, how you motivate the American people. What are the right buttons to push? And the button he decides to push. It's not the Rambo button. It's not lead from the front like a Churchill where, you know, give us the tools and we'll finish the job. Make sure you take a German with you. All that kind of stuff. It's, they think we're weak. He's pushing that schoolyard button almost, right? But then at the end, he ends with something that you could almost hear in today's audience, everybody going, USA, USA, with that crazy chant. I will say this, though, ever the master politician and always with his eyes on the prize, Roosevelt, right after the cut we're going to do, incorporates the rest of the United Nations, right? All the other countries of the world, he portrays this as a battle between like a hundred countries on one side and six or seven on the other. And everyone has their role to play. In other words, the great politician makes sure not to make it sound like it's an all American show. Make sure to include every one of them. Say every one of them's got their important place. That's masterful.
SPEAKER_02: But he basically says, you know, Japan's calling us a bunch of weaklings. Are you going to take that? We'll show them and we already have. He says this.
SPEAKER_01: Ever since this nation became the arsenal of democracy, ever since enactment of Lend-Lease, there has been one persistent theme through all axis propaganda. This theme has been that Americans are admittedly rich, that Americans have considerable industrial power, but that Americans are soft and decadent, that they cannot and will not unite and will not be able to be
SPEAKER_01: able to work and fight. From Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo, we have been described as a nation of weaklings, playboys who would hire British soldiers or Russian soldiers or Chinese soldiers to do our fighting for us. Let them repeat that now. Let them tell that to General MacArthur and his men. Let them tell that to the sailors who today are hitting hard in the far waters of the Pacific. Let them tell that to the boys in the flying fortresses. Let them tell that to the Marines.
SPEAKER_02: Now while this broadcast is going on, a Japanese submarine, a huge submarine by the way, the Japanese, like the French, built some very big ones, surfaces off the coast of California over by Santa Barbara. It's about 7, 7.15 pm Pacific time, so it's gloomy or it's dark, and with a 140mm deck gun, they shell some refinery installations on the coast. This is a legendary incident where I come from in the era where I grew up with. Everybody still talked about it. Most of the rest of the country doesn't know anything about it. This attack may have been timed to coincide with Roosevelt's speech as a way to put the lie to all of his fancy and inspirational talk. Right? Oh sure, you can't even keep us from shelling your coastline while you're giving the speech. I mean, it's a gesture that involves one finger in the United States and two in Great Britain. Regardless of the intention of this Japanese sub as it related to the Roosevelt speech, it's a pretty classic sort of an attack against the morale of the enemy, intended to sow fear and a sense of vulnerability, right? Low risk, high reward sort of endeavor, worst case scenario you lose a sub, best case scenario who knows, right? Just free money, let's gamble with that. I don't think the sub did anything to damage morale, but it sure already added a few more sticks of kindling to the fire that was burning on the West Coast in terms of fear. History books have labeled this the West Coast war scare or the West Coast war panic during this time period, and having a Japanese sub open fire off, you know, right on the coast there, I mean, that panicked people. Exhibit A that it had some effect is the very next evening, February 24th, 25th, 1942, anti-aircraft artillery on the California coast around Los Angeles opens up in the night sky after somebody thinks they see Japanese aircraft. It was probably a weather balloon or the moon reflecting off the clouds, but 14 or 1500 shells later, four or five people dead from car accidents and heart attacks, property damage, things quiet down, but it was apparent that once somebody opened fire, everybody opened fire. My grandfather was one of those people, by the way, always felt he was cursed by being born in April 1906, something most people would probably consider to be a sweet spot in the 20th century, too young for the First World War to serve, too old for the second where he had two kids. He wanted to be there, though. He was a chain smoking, red haired, Irish American adrenaline junkie Batman kind of guy. And so he made sure he was on the coast, serving in the, you know, the volunteer, the civilian role where you're manning the anti-aircraft guns on the coast. He witnessed the whole thing. It was a family story for a long time. Didn't know it had an official name until I looked it up. The Battle of Los Angeles. But the Battle of Los Angeles is evidence of panic in part set off by a sub-attack on the coast. Really only, I mean, it would have taken only a couple of hours for a sub to get from Santa Barbara down to L.A. and might not have even taken that long.
SPEAKER_02: These days you find out we have a good sized great white shark prowling off the coast and people will panic. Imagine how we do with active submarines. That's why keeping the fear down is important because if the fear takes off, it will devour lots of things that you'll be sorry about later. Case in point, some civil rights. Civil rights and wartime are two things that we all understand are sort of at odds with each other. It's tough to maintain peacetime levels of civil rights in wartime, especially total war. But the problem is, in this conflict in the Second World War, this is something that the framework exists, the propaganda is geared toward and people understand it as a war between people who believe in things like what we would call civil rights and people who don't. And so there's an irony attached to it that in order to beat the people who don't believe in civil rights, you have to do things that reduce the amount of civil rights in the countries that are fighting for that. There's a quote from, I think it's from Mein Kampf, it's a famous Hitler quote where he said that the great strength of a totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it. I was doing some research on that quote and I stumbled across a piece, a journal or something that was quoting from a debate between George Orwell who wrote 1984 and weird, wild, wonderful scientist Alex Comfort. And they were talking about this same thing and neither of those guys fit into the American standard political spectrum anyway, especially not Comfort. But Comfort played off of that Hitler quote and basically said he's right and we're falling for it and he wrote, Hitler's greatest and irretrievable victory over here, meaning Britain, was when he persuaded the English people that the only way to lick fascism was to imitate it. He puts us in a dilemma which cannot be practically rebutted, only broken away from. Now speaking in Hitler's voice, if I win, you have political fascism victorious. If you want to beat me, you must assimilate as much of its philosophy as you can so that I am bound to win either way. End quote. Reminds me of some of the critiques of the US founding fathers about wars danger to political and civil liberty. Wartime exalts the power of the state over the individual for obvious and understandable reasons. But that's why the fascist states like war and praise war because it dovetails into something they already believe in, the power of the state. In the Western democracies that are supposed to have these civil protections that tend to get steamrolled in wartime, well it works against the basic, you know, framework of the system as it's at least advertised. If you want a practical example, I would only cite executive order 9066, which is infamous, but if you read it, it doesn't sound like it should be. This is an executive order signed by President Roosevelt about a week before that speech, that fireside chat we just took an excerpt from. And it, along with several subsequent sorts of orders and directives, ends up creating a situation where you get 110 to 120,000 people of Japanese birth or descent. The majority of them, by the way, you know, 60 or 70% of them American born citizens, sent to what we used to call, and it sounded better than relocation camps, when I was a teenager, got changed to the more ominous internment camps. And now it's common to see the much more ominous, but not Nazi death camp equivalent of concentration camps. If you actually go read executive order 9066, it sounds short, it sounds vague, and it sounds something that's sort of common sensical. I mean, if you look at it, you just think, well, I'd be mad at a president who would be dereliction of duty if he didn't do something like this. It sounds like an anti-sabotage and anti-espionage thing. We're going to have these really sensitive national security areas. We're going to put a military leader in charge of this whole regions of the country, right? One guy for the West, one guy for the East, you know, South. And they're going to decide what these zones are. And it could be off limits to anybody, but especially enemies. It doesn't say Japanese this or that. And you think, oh yeah, an airfield, an army base, a port. Gotcha. Everybody can agree with that. Who knew that the guy that's in charge of the West, who did not like Japanese people clearly anyway and pretty openly, who knew he was going to say that these little national security areas that are going to be off limits are going to be California, Oregon, and Washington, and states to be added later. Every Japanese person was sent out of Alaska to qualify to be relocated, by the way. You know how much Japanese blood you had to have in you? One sixteenth. If we applied that same standard to Italian Americans or German Americans and sent them all to relocation camps, how many Americans would you, well, the Irish Americans would rule the day, wouldn't they? Probably. Scandinavian Americans. I mean, it'd be a small group after a while, wouldn't it? And that is not to say that the Italian Americans and German Americans did not feel these civil rights violations. They did. Like 10 or 11,000 German-born nationals or descendants of Germans were put in similar situations to the Japanese. Between 3 and 4,000 Italian-born or Italian Americans were as well. For some reason, that's probably not hard to figure out. The Japanese Americans were affected at ten times the number of German Americans. In order to avoid the normal criticism these days that people can brush aside this kind of talk because it's part of the postmodernist over-emphasis on a race that's so popular now, I picked a ton of people's favorite book if you're my age, the 1985 published Eagle Against the Sun by military historian Richard H. Spector, so that we could avoid any suggestions that this was tainted by the sort of modernist climate today that allows people to not think about this stuff. And I should also point out that what happened to the Japanese Americans has been apologized by multiple U.S. presidents. I think Ronald Reagan gave the most open and long-winded kind of thing apology. I mean, we paid indemnities. Carter, Ford, Reagan, the elder Bush. I mean, these are all presidents who brought it up. And this is something we feel terrible about. My cynical way of looking at it, though, is I'm not sure we wouldn't do it again in the same circumstances, which is why I'm always leery of blaming the people at the time. Ronald H. Spector doesn't seem to have that kind of problem. Writing in 1985, he says, quote, End quote. I should point out that this fear that these people were going to be a problem turned out to be 100 percent completely unfounded in terms of espionage and sabotage in the war. I mean, there were there's no rationale for this, but we need to understand the fear involved. This is the sort of things we've talked about before that leeches away from the history books that makes it impossible for us to understand people from other eras because we don't we're not scared like they were. We don't have the emotions anymore. And, you know, we had talked about this analogy of the spider in your hotel room. It's going to be hard enough to go to sleep knowing that spiders there. If everybody is assuring you that it's not dangerous at all. What if everybody is doing the exact opposite? The human beings, the Americans in this story. Are not operating in a neutral informational environment, something Ronald H. Spector in 1984 also emphasizes. What's the climate like that all this is happening in? He says, quote. Jap boats flash messages ashore and Jap and camera held in Bay City and even caps on Japanese tomato plants point to air base. He continues at a meeting of California law enforcement officials in January 1942, the Los Angeles District Attorney, now quoting from a contemporary source, asserted that the U.S. Supreme Court was packed with leftists and other extreme advocates of civil liberty, and that it was time for the people of California to disregard the law if necessary to secure their protection. Later in the source, it says one high official was hurt to state that he favored shooting on sight all Japanese residents of the state. End quote. Maybe I'm reaching here, but you know, when you read why Hitler thought the United States was weak, it was always because we were among role poly got nation. We didn't have this racial unity that kept us together and we were liable to be pulled apart. I mean, you know, ex slaves, all these immigrants. If you're looking at the world through his lens, maybe you could see that Japanese sub attack and all the other things that create things like a West Coast war scare as something that begins the process of pulling us apart a little bit. And lest we think that this is something that only our grandparents would do, I have to tell you, after the 9 11 attacks, the mood was already wobbly. I thought and had there been an al Qaeda submarine that surfaced off the coast and sent dozens of shells into some facility there. I think we'd start to see some of the kind of editorials that you were seeing in the vast majority of West Coast newspapers that were in favor of taking their fellow citizens to internment camps. One of them had a great line. I thought I went and read it and it said, Listen, you don't think you're letting Americans run around loose in Italy, Germany and Japan, do you? And that's absolutely right. In Germany, the Gestapo will find you and they will take you down to a dungeon and they will torture the life out of you till you give the names of your compatriots who they will also torture and then they'll execute all of you. Want to do that in your Western democracy? Well, of course you don't. That's why you're fighting the war, right? To avoid a fate like that. You just have to be careful you don't end up at that destination accidentally anyway because of the war. Makes you think of the Nietzsche line, doesn't it? That when you're fighting monsters, you need to take care that you yourself don't become a monster. And the lesson of the experience of the minorities in the United States, mostly Japanese, but also German and Italian during the Second World War is not that it should never happen again to them, but that wartime opens the door to the breaking of protections that defend us all. And that sort of experience could happen to any of us. Now I should point out that in terms of actual importance to the overall Asia Pacific theater and events that comprise a giant chunk of the globe, this sub-attack against Santa Barbara is nothing. I have overplayed its importance, but I did it for a reason. In Iowa, they would have glanced over the news story and hardly noticed it, gone right to the farming futures maybe in 1942. On the East Coast, they wouldn't have even raised an eyebrow. They've been living with U-boats operating off their coastline for months. So, big deal. But my grandparents talked about that sub-attack for the rest of their lives. Something most people don't even know about. It scared everybody on the West Coast. So if you're going to have a West Coast war hysteria, those are the people you have to frighten, right? The question that's interesting to ask is, does a West Coast war hysteria actually help the Japanese? Does it make the United States weaker? You know, once again, we're into this unquantifiable squishy area of national psychology and morale and all that kind of stuff. It's hard to measure. The accountants can really enjoy themselves on the other side of war, the part where you're going to say, oh, we killed this many of the enemy and we lost this many men in killing that many of the enemy. You can start to make charts and comparisons and intelligent decisions based on the rational data. You know, that whole side of war. But this is the squishy side. And you can't say that that Japanese sub-attack had no impact on everything that happened afterwards, but you can't say that it had all the impact. I mean, you don't know what to say. So the question that comes into play with these kinds of offensives against the squishy underbelly of the enemy's morale, how much are you willing to lose in order to potentially get whatever it is you get? In the case of the Japanese sub-attack, it was one submarine. If I'm war game in this and I'm the Japanese high command, I think one submarine risked to get a chance to spin the wheel of who knows what happens if we shell the United States coastlines. Worth it to me. The question gets a little bit more upsetting, though. If you begin to risk too much, I would think, I'm a conservative person, take that with a grain of salt. But if you risk too much in this war against the squishy side, for lack of a better phrase, case in point, and yes, this will finally bring us back up to where we last left off in the story. I told you all that stuff to tell you this stuff. Right after Bataan falls, and you have the Bataan Death March in early April 1942, which is where we left off. So once again, what FDR was prepping the American people for, the worst surrender, or one of the worst surrenders in American military history, coming right after all this other bad news, I mean, the US needed some good news. How much would you be willing to risk in terms of human lives or precious, in some cases irreplaceable military assets to get that morale lifted home? Especially if you could at the same time damage the enemy's morale. One submarine, certainly nobody has a problem with that. But on April 18th, 1942, the United States will conduct an operation that is highly celebrated. It's mythical in the United States. But I think if you look at it logically, and again, I will totally cop to being wrong here, and I'm a conservative person as I said, I can't see it as worth it in any way, shape, or form, which is a terrible thing to say because the brave people who went on it knew they were almost maybe on a suicide mission. It's called the Doolittle Raid. The reason that it's audacious is because it involves something that had never been done before and that I don't know that has been tried many times since. Flying land-based bombers, big bombers, off aircraft carriers. The reason the US wants to do it is for a very similar reason the Japanese wanted that sub to attack the US coastline. The gains would be similar and there would be no way with this attack to do any meaningful damage just like that sub didn't do any meaningful damage. It's symbolic damage meant to affect psychology and morale and all that. But the United States in order to carry out this morale boosting at home and morale damaging, hopefully a broad operation, they're going to risk two aircraft carriers at a time when they only have four in the Pacific theater. At a time when aircraft carriers have unexpectedly and as a surprise to everyone have turned out to be the most important ship now going into the mid 20th century. Everybody thought it was going to be battleships and now here we are and you're stuck with what you built before you knew that it was going to be the most important system and everybody's frantically working on more. But there's a two year lag time or something on these things. So you want to be careful with them. And here the United States when the Japanese Navy is basically undefeated at this point in the war. Very scary, surprised. I mean you do not want to have to face them. We risk two carriers, we meaning the United States, to launch these 15 or 16 B-25 medium bombers over Japan. At the last minute they have to launch much farther away from Japan than they thought because they get discovered. Again, how much, I mean, look what happened to the Repulse and the Prince of Wales not that long before, right? I mean you could lose these things in an instant if the tide of war sweeps over you the wrong way and in naval warfare it often does. I mean there'll be a hole in the clouds, the other side's reconnaissance aircraft sees you and uh oh. So it's risky. These planes are supposed to land in bases on the other side. It's a one way trip. They're not landing on those carriers. They're going to bomb Japan and keep going. And then land in China hopefully but a lot of China is run by Japan at this time period. Long story short, some of them make it home, some of them don't. None of the planes make it home. The aircraft carriers get away which is the main thing from a US perspective. There's a bump, first good news in the newspapers in the United States in a long time, wonderful, how much is that worth? And there is a real sense and after the war you get memoirs and everything that confirms it that this was very embarrassing to Japanese military leadership because if nothing else it put the Emperor's physical safety in jeopardy which is intolerable. So it had that effect. Again, what's that worth though from a cost to benefit ratio? It's worth one sub to me. I don't think it's worth two carriers in early 1942 especially since you're going to really really really need those carriers soon. Two other quick points worth making about the Doolittle raid. The first is that there is another way of looking at this and people who score more aggressively on the willing to take risk military commander spectrum than I do will say that in addition to the, you know everyone agrees upon morale and psychology boosts and effects that there was a real world goal in this whole thing and that it was achieved and the real world goal was the equivalent of what a boxer does when he faints an opponent in the ring. The Japanese flinched. They reacted to the blow by changing their strategy, moving their assets around, doing things differently and perhaps deciding different places to strike and maneuver in order to prevent anything like this from happening again. So in other words a real world military effect. Something that's hard to measure in terms of how much of an effect and how much that helps but something different from the psychological or morale side of things. I tend to think it's a little bit more like you spin the wheel of what happens when we bomb Japan and something good came up but everybody's got a different opinion. Now something that is not a question of opinion is the real world effects of the Doolittle raid on our allies if you're in an allied country, the Chinese. Because they were so obviously in on this plan. They were to provide the bases that the pilots and the plane crews landed at. But there's a harrowing personal experiences thing on the Chinese side that's little known in the United States. The Japanese took their anger out on the only allied people that they could get their hands on and take their anger out on. They punished the Chinese. The numbers are incredible. Most people think that Chiang Kai-Shek was exaggerating but cut him in half if you want. Chiang says 250,000 Chinese civilians paid with their lives in reprisals for the Doolittle raid. In his book, Hirohito's War, author Francis Pike puts it this way, quote, Chiang would later notify Roosevelt that in southern China the Japanese army slaughtered 250,000 Chinese civilians in a campaign of vengeance. Even allowing for some exaggeration on Chiang's part, the Doolittle raid thus caused the death of more than twice the number of Chinese than the United States military suffered during the entire Pacific War. End quote. I'm fascinated by human experiences. It's part of the reason we focus so much of it in these conversations. And in the same way I can't help but think about those B-25 crews that have just bombed Japan and whose planes are running out of fuel and now they're going to bail out. I can't help but wonder, oh my God, what is that like? And you think about that human experience. And that is one kind of human experience. But at the very opposite end of the scale, what Franklin Roosevelt experiences when his ally Chiang Kai-Shek tells him that resulting from decisions that he made, 250,000 civilians are brutally killed, that's a different kind of human experience. How'd you like to be in Franklin Roosevelt's shoes right then? Now disclaimer, there are well-known leaders of countries on both the Axis and Allied side who seem to have not a ton of sympathy for human suffering. One of them is alleged to have said that one death is a tragedy, a million a statistic. Another sets up human extermination camps that run like a factory operation. So let's not attribute this same sense of gut punch when you find out what results downstream sometimes from your decision making to all of them. But I do not believe many people would think Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of those people. And yes, war results and terrible things happen. But in this case, Roosevelt is on record as saying what he was trying to do here with a raid that would not have killed tons of people anyway was bring the war home to the Japanese and show them what this was like. You know, here's what you bargained for. This is what's going to happen because you struck. In other words, in his way, this was a measured sort of a response that sent a message. And yet as a result of that decision, 250,000 civilians are killed. I cannot imagine that Roosevelt could have reacted to that well. I wonder what that night's attempt to sleep was like. That's not a human experience many people ever have to have either. Knowing that any decision you make could, in many cases, unforeseeably result in the deaths of huge numbers of human beings would paralyze most of us. But there's an alternative way of looking at this that's I think it's almost like a DNA built in outlook. It's just a different point of view. But enough of these people think this way. So it's a type and maybe it has to be the kind of type you have in a war leader. I had a friend who thought they were all sociopaths because they have to disregard human suffering. But I don't believe that. I think they have an alternative rationale, which is that this suffering that these decisions result in are the price you pay for a better long-term outcome. Lower casualties than you would have otherwise had, less suffering than you otherwise would have had, a better outcome than you otherwise would have had. And listen, not making a move sometimes because you don't want to do anything that could kill tons of people could end up killing more people in the long run. So there's not even a sort of a safe strategy to take here. Want to trade places with one of these war leaders in terms of responsibility? I don't mean to say by the way that Roosevelt has dictatorial-like powers in the Second World War. There is still a US Congress. He's consulting all the time with military leaders, industrial leaders. He's got a lot of influences working on him from every direction. But the Constitution gives the US president a lot of war fighting authority. And so to quote Harry Truman, Roosevelt's successor, when it comes to ultimate responsibility for things, the buck stops here, meaning the president's desk. And in the case of Roosevelt, you know, when weighing decisions versus outcomes, the buck stops there. But when you think about it, that's pretty common, isn't it? I mean, certainly in the Third Reich, the buck stops with Hitler, doesn't it? In the Soviet Union, it sure as heck stops with Stalin, doesn't it? He's the one with the responsibility. I think it's fair to say the buck stops with Churchill in the UK, even though that's a Western democracy and they have a parliament. Who does the buck stop with, though, in Japan? Earlier, we spent quite a bit of time talking about the unique way that the Japanese system, its politics and its culture developed after, well, really for more than a century before the Second World War, and how the system itself would break down. In the war, this is one of the ways it breaks down. There is no place the buck stops when it comes to Japanese military responsibility. And if you're analyzing the Second World War from sort of the big picture level, this is one of the strangest things. The Japanese command and control their leadership situation, none of this is anything like any of the other powers. We had said it's got a very sort of uniquely Japanese sort of feel to it. At the same time, this diffusion of responsibility is something that the other governments either did away with because they're totalitarian, they don't believe in diffusion of power anyway, or temporarily suspended a lot of it, like in the US and the UK with their wartime governments. The Japanese kind of don't. And it's because they can't. There are certain elements that are built into the system, right? American propaganda used to always lump the Japanese in with the Germans and the Italians, right? It was always the big three Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, as though they're all totalitarian is all fascists, all dictators, but Tojo wasn't might like to have been Japan might have done better if he was. He was the most powerful Prime Minister, John L. MacLean says in a modern history of Japan, the most powerful Prime Minister Japan had ever had gobbled up a couple of other political offices to seems to be consolidating his power. Still couldn't control his underlings. He's an army general couldn't even totally control the army. Forget about the Navy. We talked about the fact that the Japanese have the most hostile inner service rivalry problem I've ever seen. Army and the Navy actively dislike each other. Don't tell each other things. There really is nobody who can tell them what to do. When you hear the way sometimes Tojo is treated by his supposed underlings. Well, that puts the lie to the idea that they're anything like Hitler or Stalin in terms of their power because a Hitler'd kill you. So it's Stalin if a general walked in to the office demanded that you overturn a decision and then called you a stupid fool to your face. James L. MacLean tells a story in his book where that's exactly what happened to Tojo. Tells another story of another general who walks in bursts into Tojo's office and demands that he either resign or shoot himself. Again, doesn't sound like the kind of government you're dealing with in the Soviet state or the Third Reich. What it means though is there's no one here who can override one side, referee disputes. What do you do if the Army and the Navy have disagreements on how to fight the war? And you can't make them agree with each other and unify and we're all on the same team here, right? What if they go their own way? What if they don't even tell you some of the things they're doing? The Japanese war effort throughout the entire conflict looks very strange in terms of when you're sitting there going, now, what are they trying to do? And it's because they're not operating with one voice. Now the Japanese obviously an extreme version of this, but the Axis has this problem across the board. The Allies are doing a great job working together, communicating. They'll eventually have whole conferences where all these guys, the leaders of the countries get together. The Axis isn't doing anything like this. Cooperation is rare. Communication is rare. Sharing of intelligence is rare. The Allies are doing a lot more of that. Not so much the intelligence. But if you look at this command and control problem that we just talked about, you add it to the other very non-sexy things in this war that the Allies simply dominate in. Industrial production, possession of natural resources. I mean the Allies are swimming in oil. The Axis always seem down, especially after the midway point in the war. Always seem down to like their last cans of gas. The logistics, the ability to get stuff to the people who are fighting. And the question of intelligence, knowing what your enemy is going to do and preventing them from knowing what you're going to do. These are areas where the Axis are dominated by the Allies. I mean as a war game player you can't help but notice how great, for example, German equipment is on the battlefield. They have great tanks, great anti-tank guns, great planes, all this kind of stuff. Great quality. And so you wonder how did they win this war? They win this war with all the stuff that isn't that sort of sexy stuff. Take intelligence. The United States and the United Kingdom are the best code breakers and signals intelligence people in the world. They are very good at what they do and they're sharing their information. The Soviets are fantastic at the old fashioned boots on the ground kind of intelligence, human intelligence spying. Hard to find a country that does a better job. And their ideology, which has this global appeal, you know they're all comrades if you're a working person worldwide, tends to make it a little easier for them to recruit people to work in other countries for their cause than it would be if they were just saying, you know, we need people who agree with Russia and our national aims. It's another thing to say, you know, comrade help us out as a fellow traveler for a giant world revolution. And it always seems like you could have even three people in the most top secret kind of get together over something like an atomic bomb or something like that and one of them will be a Soviet mole. Now I should say there's been a lot of argument amongst historians about the value of this intelligence and how you try to quantify how much of an advantage the allies had because of it. And some people will say it shortened the war by a lot, others by a little. You can't argue with certain things though that you just have to look at as enormous and they're basically intelligence related things. The Soviet Union had a spy who was able to tell them that the Japanese were not going to attack the Soviet Union and help the Germans who were driving toward Moscow but were instead going to bomb Pearl Harbor and go that route. That allowed Stalin to free up 30 to 40 divisions in his east and send them west to help keep the Germans from taking Moscow. How do you put a value on that? There are researchers and scientists in Poland who years before the war had started to dissect some of the German cryptological equipment, cryptographical equipment. Then they worked with the French and when the war started they transferred their information to the British. The British had something called an enigma machine which is like a little coding typewriter that you had to have on both ends of a coded message to decode it and the Germans thought it was safe and the British had one. It's part of a program called Ultra and it was called Ultra because it was ultra secret and the information from Ultra did not become available until the mid 1970s. Which means if you look at the history of the Second World War before the mid 1970s and there is no word Ultra in the back index, it shows you that their view of the war is going to be very different than ours because we know how much the allies knew about the Axis capabilities and intentions. I mean make something like the whole North Africa campaign look kind of different. Everybody thought and I read this in a book, everybody thought Montgomery was reading Rommel's mind and as one historian said he was instead reading his mail. In the Pacific the United States had some idea of the Japanese coded messages and could read some of the stuff some of the time and you have to be so careful because you have to make sure they're not feeding you a load of baloney if they figured out that you're reading their messages. You also have to be careful about how you react to those messages because if you're too perfect and you react to everything you decode they'll realize you've decoded their message. There's a book called Bodyguard of Lies which is all about the Enigma and the Ultra program and how they have to make trade off sometimes and let troops go to their deaths in a situation where they know they shouldn't be going into that situation but if they cancel it the Germans will understand that the traffic's been compromised. They'll change the way they code things. So sometimes you make these hard choices to keep the information conduit open and save it for the really big decisive moments. Of course let's not pretend that you can always know what's going to be decisive before it is. There are some obvious cases if you're going to have a huge battle throw a ton of your strength in for some war winning or war losing objective you don't have to be Nostradamus to see that that's going to be decisive and you should burn all your intelligence bridges or whatever it takes to give yourself an edge. But as all of us with an even cursory knowledge of war knows it is famously serendipitous and often involves luck and chance and all these things. That's why you have things like dice in wargaming. That's what you're simulating there. The random factors that are often out of one's control. I like the most stark examples. Those stories of ancient battles where the wind whips up unexpectedly and blows sand in the face of only one side and so they lose. Something that would probably be seen as the gods making a choice in a battle like that, right? The problem with the wind whipping up though is you think well how do you take advantage of that? How do you use that ahead of time and know and make that decisive? Well the easy answer is you can't. Of course I think about like a Julius Caesar who might have gone to the battlefield days in advance, interviewed the locals, said does the wind ever blow through these mountains? What time of day does that happen? Is it happening this time of year? Does it hit the side of the river that's on the east or the west? I mean you could kind of maybe take advantage of it. It's a double edged sword though because sometimes having information in advance forces you to do something. And if you do something and it turns out wrong you might have been better off not doing anything at all. I love that Herodotus story about the king of Lydia that goes to the Oracle and says should I attack the empire of Cyrus the Great? And the Oracle says if you attack Cyrus the Great you will destroy a great empire. So he does and loses destroying his own great empire. So you got to be careful. In mid April 1942 Admiral Chester Nimitz, US Admiral Chester Nimitz, I believe his command is the US Central Pacific area or the Central Pacific. And he gets information transmitted to him up the sort of military food chain emanating originally from some of the crypto analysts like Joseph Roquefort, fabulously interesting guys in their own right. And the information is like the water of Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings when the hobbits could look down in that water and they see what might be the future. But it also might be something that's a trick but it also might be something that they want to see. It's intelligence right? It's stuff from the crypto analyst that puts some of the jigsaw puzzle pieces together in a way that allows them to say with some confidence they think or they wouldn't have brought it to Nimitz what the Japanese are going to do in about two months. So it's a little glimpse into the not too distant future. Now the problem a guy like Nimitz has with something like this is what do you do with it? Do you act on it? Well what if the crypto analysts have it wrong? Or worse yet what if the Japanese have figured out that some of their codes are broken and deliberately gave false information out there to trap you? Nimitz brings it to other admirals. They're of mixed opinion. Some agree with him that this is actionable intelligence that we should take advantage of. Others much less sure saying there's a lot of guesswork going on here. Eventually Nimitz gets approval though because he seems to buy it to take advantage of this actionable intelligence by taking an action. His problem is he doesn't have all that much to work with. As we said earlier American aircraft carrier strength in the Pacific and aircraft carriers have turned out to be the important weapons system although that's not totally confirmed at this point in the war yet but people are starting to think ahead. American aircraft carrier strength in the Pacific is four. The Japanese if you count light carriers have more than twice as many and when Nimitz has this two weeks notice with which to take advantage of the intelligence he may not have all four of them because two of them are off conducting the Doolittle raid sort of near Japan. He'll send them if he can but he's not in charge of the timetable here. The Japanese are. They're launching what they believe is a surprise attack on the island of New Guinea the second largest island on the planet. That's what Nimitz gets information about. What's more the crypto analysts think it's going to be at Port Moseby which if so is extra scary for the Allies because Port Moseby is on the Australian side of New Guinea. Allows the Japanese to avoid having to traipse over the mountain range in the middle of New Guinea which is the whole thing actually is just wicked. We talked about it earlier in the story depending on your personal fears and things that make you squirm. New Guinea might be for you the worst place in the world to fight. Some of you who really hate the cold probably wouldn't want to be on the eastern front. There's a lot of bad theaters but for a lot of people New Guinea would make the top of the list. The Japanese are going to go around the side of the island to the far side the Australian side at Port Moseby and avoid that whole mountain range and they're going to do it by ship. They're going to have some transports to carry the troops. They're going to have some escort ships to keep an eye on them. And in this case going to have a couple of aircraft carriers two big ones and a light aircraft carrier nearby. It's all part of a big Japanese move into that area not just New Guinea but some of the Solomon Islands like Tulagi. And if the Japanese can establish air bases there they're going to cause a lot of trouble. There'll be about 100 miles, 200 miles something like that off the Australian northern coast. That means not just bombers will be able to reach it but you'll be able to have Japanese fighter planes in that whole northern Australia area. There was an Australian prime minister who a generation before this time said that New Guinea and some of the Solomons comprise like a fortress guarding the northern approaches to Australia. What happens if the northern approaches are no longer guarded but instead are held by the Japanese? If you're an American imagine having the Japanese 100 or 200 miles off the coast. Intolerable right? Well Australia is one of those let's call them if you want to call them intolerable I like to call them geographic firewalls for the allies in this war. Places where the Japanese advance has to stop. Lines in the in the sand. Places like India on one side of the Japanese perimeter and they're advancing in that direction through Burma which is now Myanmar fighting not just forces from the United Kingdom and involving Burmese and Indian troops but also the Chinese troops linking up over there and it's key because if the Japanese get to India they'll cut off supplies to China all that kind of stuff but they can't get farther than India. Now it's hard to see them getting farther than India that's something all these geographic firewalls have encountered right? They're hard to imagine them falling they're even hard to imagine communications getting cut off significantly but like all firewalls if somehow the firewall fails if somehow the Japanese were able either directly through some sort of military endeavor or because the anti-colonial forces in a place like India were somehow exploited by Japanese propaganda. If somehow the India firewall failed well then every fantasy that the Axis dreamers have could possibly be in play then. Maybe you could have this linking up of Japanese forces and Axis Italian German Hungarian Romanian forces somewhere in the Middle Eastern oil fields right? That's a dream for all these Axis propagandists but if that happened all bets are off right? In the west on the opposite side of the Japanese defense perimeter you have the other firewall the Hawaiian Islands. Some would argue it also includes the islands that guard Hawaii so like Midway Johnson those islands. It's hard to imagine the Japanese taking those islands it's a little less hard but still hard to imagine them completely and significantly cutting off communications between those islands and the continental US but if they did all hell breaks loose. So that's the geographic firewall in that direction. North well that's the Soviet Union and if the Japanese have wanted to attack the Soviet Union they already could have now they don't want to. Now that that whole Moscow advance looked like it stalled on the on the eastern front might might have made the good decision there not to mess with the Soviet so that's a direction they can't expand in. The Japanese supernova begins to run into firewalls in every direction in the south it's Australia. And as we said maybe these these places like New Guinea and the Solomons guarding the approaches from the north. The Japanese get them it creates problems huge problems. This is also we should point out part of the effort in the plans for the reconquest of this area. MacArthur plans on using New Guinea so to have the Japanese all entrenched there with air bases and everything else well that's that's preventing that is worth losing a couple of aircraft carriers for I think you could make a case. Nimitz does make a case he gets approval to to risk these carriers and of course the reason they're a risk is anytime you want to go out there and strike a blow. You risk what you're using to strike with it's the same thing where if you throw a punch in boxing you're opening yourself up to a counter punch. And at this time the loss of two aircraft carriers half your force in the Pacific so soon after Pearl Harbor with all the other things that have happened it's a big risk. It's also a hell of an opportunity. It is the chance for a change to surprise the Japanese when up till this point in the war it's been the Japanese who've been doing all the surprising and wrong footing the allies and once they have them off balance keeping them that way. This is the era by the way and this is debatable amongst experts but but this is the era where the Japanese some of the writers especially from Japan after the war would talk about the problem with victory disease or other phrases that denoted a level of hubris that might have been creeping into some in the Japanese military. Be it Army, Navy, upper command or what not. They still have a bunch of people that think that they're doomed fighting the allies but you know so far so good right? Maybe get a little complacent and what the allies are about to do here is ambush a surprise attack. They're launching a surprise attack against a surprise attack. It's a counter surprise attack. And if a surprise attack is a force multiplier one would have to think a counter surprise attack is like a force multiplier plus. So if you're a guy like Admiral Nimitz trying to figure out you know what do I use my assets for what do I risk? What are you waiting for? This is as good as it's going to get. And the reason you care is because the intelligence shows that there's going to be a couple of Japanese aircraft carriers here. Two and a half let's call it. Shokaku, Zuikaku, two fleet carriers and the Shoho light carrier. If you have a chance because you have all the advantages in your favor to take those out that would be a nice little whittling down of Japanese aircraft carrier strength wouldn't it? So Nimitz gathers what aircraft carrier strength he has and he sends it out to the Coral Sea which washes up against both Australia and New Guinea. It's the place where you have to be to make this interception of this Japanese amphibious assault. He'll have the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier there, he'll have the Lexington there and their supporting ships and they will try to ambush the Japanese. But as we said the U.S. may have this intelligence advantage but the Japanese control the timeline. And on or around May 1st 1942 they strike in the Solomons launching amphibious assaults in places like the island of Tulagi. All part of the really early moves in this expansion of the defense perimeter southward. A couple of days after that Admiral Fletcher on board the Yorktown in response to the Tulagi invasion launches an airstrike.
SPEAKER_02: Maybe hoping to catch all those transports still on the beaches and everybody vulnerable but it's really after things are done and so the airstrike roars in and sinks a transport and a couple of patrol boats and a destroyer. It's not really a real big haul for that amount of effort expended and for what you essentially are doing also which is announcing with a giant bullhorn that there must be an American carrier at least one nearby because we just got hit with American carrier aircraft. So the Japanese carriers that are not there but not too distant begin to show up on the scene because obviously they're going to be needed more than they thought. There's at least a carrier nearby. The Americans begin positioning themselves to try to ambush this invasion force and what's going to unfold is what my Red One Admiral called it the most complex naval engagement in all history. I'm not an expert but I beg to differ just in my own personal accounts because there's about a hundred of them that look this complicated to me but that's just because I'm not that smart. It's very complicated stuff though so in a simplistic sense the best way to look at it though maybe is that it's going to be one of the last battles you're going to see. Especially once you get satellites, forget it, it's all over except for the submarines but it's going to be one of the last battles where you really get a chance to get that feel that goes back to naval battles when people were in canoes. An element that's always been present in naval warfare because of the obvious, you know it's land warfare it's a factor too but the ocean completely makes it a different ballgame. You're forever looking for the other side. Where are they? You're like two people boxing in a fog. Go watch a film like Sink the Bismarck about the sinking of the German battleship. If you watch it, it seems to me like three-fourths of that film is all like a spy versus spy thing. You know, we're tailing him, oh he gets lost in the fog, oh we've picked up his scent over here. It should be called Find the Bismarck, not Sink the Bismarck. But that dynamic is the ever-present naval dynamic that's been around since the beginning of time, right? Fleets, even large ones, get swallowed up easily in the vastness of the ocean. Then there's the atmospheric conditions in the ocean. You've got your fog, you've got your squalls, you've got your dark. I mean there's a million things that just make it sometimes hard, sometimes impossible even for fleets that want to find each other to find each other. If one side actively wants to get away, it's very difficult. What's more, in this era, where you finally have something like aircraft carriers, which extends the eyesight of the fleet, doesn't it? Far distant, because you can scout ahead with all those planes. In the old days, like right before this period, until back to the canoe era, you could see as far as the tallest crow's nest in the highest mast with your little spyglass. As you could see, and that was pretty much it, the radar is going to get pretty darn good on the American side. It's already pretty good. Pretty darn good though later in the war. Start changing the characteristics of naval warfare that have always been present. The Japanese are significantly behind in radar technology and the deployment of radar to things like fleets. Yet even with the relatively rudimentary radar on the US side, even with the submarines out there scouting supposedly, even with the air reconnaissance out there scouring the skies, even with the guys in the crow's nest on the highest mast looking for everyone, these fleets get frightfully close to each other and don't even know it. At one point they'll be 70 miles apart and not know it. How do you have all those aircraft out there scouring the skies? It boggles the mind, but it's the ocean, baby. You don't know. It's always been that way. There's something comforting though in the way things have always been. And what's about to happen in this encounter is going to change the way things have always been and begin turning them into the way things still are now. You go look at modern naval warfare and you will be struck by the speed at which it all happens, right? It's bewildering. It's disorienting. It's hard to follow. And if you're there, it's deadly. It's quick and deadly. The period at which that sort of speed acceleration happens is this period that we're talking about right now. And it's not hard to see why it's going to be the aircraft. When you have lots of fast moving, dangerous objects in the sky, things are going to be chaotic and they're going to be going fast. I mean, think of star Wars and you have the big giant ships, but they're besieged by hundreds of the little teeny fighters. If nothing else, it's fast. These admirals that are heading to an encounter here are both working without any actual hard data of what it's like when two aircraft carrier armed fleets face each other. This is the first time that's ever happened. The Japanese about a month before this time period sank an old antiquated British light carrier in the Indian ocean, but it wasn't a combat. This is full on combat. And both admirals are sort of winging it, if you'll pardon the pun, but they're going to learn a lot. If you actually get granular though, and study what's involved in carrier warfare with the timetables involved in launching and bringing back planes and, and having to, you know, the time involved in rearming them or changing their armament. These aren't just details. They're going to be the really crucial details. And for a bunch of admirals who are surface fleet commanders or submarine commanders, guys who are from a different world entirely, they're all learning on the job here. And the American crews and pilots and everybody, especially this is, it's not so much a baptism of fire because these aircraft carriers have been involved in the little strikes here and there, but this is real. This is not like little raids. This is the full blown thing. The Japanese are much more experienced in that regard, and they have been fighting with each other a lot longer. It's more of a smooth running machine, but they haven't had to fight aircraft carriers either. Both sides had conducted exercises and war games before the war and certainly continuing, you know, even after the war, trying to replicate what might happen when these kinds of fleets ran into each other. And I was reading something on the US exercises a little while ago that was saying that the evidence seemed to show that you had to, as the Americans, you had to find the Japanese carriers before they found you. And you had to launch a strike with almost everything you had immediately upon finding it in the hopes that you could knock out their carriers before they could launch a strike at you. Think of two gunfighters trying to be quicker on the draw. Not only do you have to kill the other gunfighter, but you have to make sure you kill them before they loose off a shot at you. Because it could be like striking beyond the grave if the American aircraft are able to sink the Japanese carrier, but not before the Japanese carrier unleashes their planes that then knock out, you know, the very carrier that killed them. It's like the two fighters killing each other at the same time. Sounds very Japanese samurai-ish right there, doesn't it? Or King Arthur-ish. But what this does is it puts a real emphasis on, you know, like a nail-biting emphasis on finding the enemy and then immediately crippling them. It gives you an itchy trigger finger, if we can continue the gunfight analogy here. And both sides have it. And it contributes to how things play out. Because on May 7th, both sides are looking for each other. I've read two things. I've read that neither side knows where the other is, and I've read that both sides kind of think that they know where the other is. But on May 7th, both sides think they find each other. And the Japanese get an early report in the early part of the morning that they found at least one aircraft carrier. So the Japanese, doing what you should do based on what evidence, you know, the studies seem to show, right? Go get them before they could get you, launches a full strike. And the full strike arrives on the scene to find not an aircraft carrier, but an oiler, a refueling ship and a destroyer. The problem with throwing a punch like that, you know, all the right common sense reasons, right? Take them out before they take you out. But while you're taking them out, you're totally defenseless. That's something else the pre-war war game showed. With all, you're basically a floating gasoline and munitions vehicle without protection. And even those small groups of fighters you keep back, known as CAP or combat air patrol, they're going to prove to be less than 100% effective, at least for the early part of the war. So to launch a strike, to take out the enemy carriers who could hurt you and realize that the Japanese reconnaissance guy had given you the wrong information is potentially devastating. The Americans have a similar problem happen to them a couple hours later, though, when one of their reconnaissance planes accurately identifies some Japanese cruisers that they find, but somehow muffles the communications back with the fleet and the admiral. And what should say cruisers instead reads on the other side of the message in Admiral Fletcher's hands, carriers. So Admiral Fletcher does exactly what the pre-war evidence would seem to indicate you should do. Go get them and launches a full strike. Those two reconnaissance pilots who muffled the message exchange then have to land and run into Admiral Fletcher in his book, Hirohito's War. Author Francis Pike talks about that. So first he talks about how the strike gets going, and then he talks about Admiral Fletcher realizing that he's just launched his entire strike force against a few cruisers. Pike writes, quote, By 9.26am, Yorktown's entire strike force of 93 planes had been spotted, meaning fueled and armed on deck, on deck, and Fletcher came onto the bridge wing with a bullhorn and ordered them to get that goddamn carrier. 45 minutes later, the strike force was on its way. Nielsen and Straube, those are the two aircraft reconnaissance guys, now returned to the Yorktown, dropping a beanbag with an attached note that confirmed the location of the Japanese force. Fletcher was horrified to see that the note mentioned two cruisers and four destroyers, not a word about carriers. As a result of the miscommunication, Fletcher had launched his entire strike force against a small cruiser force, leaving his own carriers bare to attack from Japan's carriers. When Nielsen landed, Fletcher asked him, what about the carriers? The shocked admiral, according to one witness, told Nielsen, young man, do you know what you have done? You have just cost the United States two carriers. End quote.
SPEAKER_02: The Americans got lucky. Another reconnaissance plane spotted not one of the big fleet carriers, but the light carrier Shoho, steaming about 20 or 30 miles away. Radioed that information back, Fletcher was able to break radio silence and vector the attack, which was of course going toward those insignificant cruisers, to change course and hit the Japanese light carrier. The Shoho got to be an early example of exactly why these admirals had every reason to be frightened to death of what these aircraft could do. She was blown right out of the water. The after action reports of fighter pilots and combat pilots and bomber pilots of all kinds are wildly and notoriously and historically in every culture in the world that has them optimistic. They're an optimistic lot. I think in the Battle of Britain, they actually had a formula to weed out the natural optimism of fighter pilots. So take these numbers with a grain of salt. Craig L. Simon says that pilots from the Lexington claimed to hit the Shoho with five bombs and nine torpedoes. The Yorktown crews claimed 14 bomb hits and 10 torpedo hits. 700 crew members or something and they pulled a little over 200 out of the water. Scratch one flat top was the famous American message back to let the commanders of the fleet know that they'd gotten a carrier. May 7th is kind of the appetizer for May 8th and here's how historian, Naval historian Craig L. Simons describes the next day. He writes, quote, The air attacks of May 7th were only the preliminary skirmish. The next day, scout planes from each side finally sighted the others carriers. And at almost the same moment, the Americans and the Japanese launched full deck loads of attack planes toward the others position. The planes even passed one another en route to their targets. Arriving first, the Americans encountered ferocious opposition from Japanese Zeros flying CAP. That's combat air patrol, the defense of the fighters of their own aircraft carriers. An American pilot recalled, now quoting the pilot, quote, It was an incredible scramble. People yelling over the radio, mixed up and you never knew who was on top of whom. Amidst the chaos, Simons writes, and harassed by the Zeros, the torpedo planes scored no hits. The dive bombers, however, plunging almost straight down from 14,000 feet, put three 1,000 pound bombs onto the Shokaku. Utterly wrecking her flight deck, though she managed to stay afloat. The Zuikaku, obscured by dense cloud cover, escaped entirely. End quote. It's worth a tiny moment aside here, because it's part of those weird sort of tragedies of war. We talked earlier about things that will fail in the acid test of combat. You don't know until it happens. One of those things is going to be the American torpedo. Sounds like a small thing to bring up, doesn't it? But the American torpedo in the early part of the war is probably the worst torpedo of all the major powers. It's dysfunctional and unreliable. Often didn't explode. Often ran too deep. All kinds of problems. It's been a scandal amongst some. And they've been writing since I was a kid, blaming all kinds of things. From the underperformance of the US submarine service early in the war, to the PT boats, to the torpedo planes. Blaming this weapon system that did not pass the acid test of combat. Now the Japanese, on the other side of the coin, have by far, and it's not even close, the best torpedoes in the war. So that's an area where the United States has the radar, the Japanese have the torpedoes. I take the radar over the torpedoes, but the torpedoes are not insignificant. Especially now, when they are supposed to be the main ship killing weapon in these naval arsenals. There's a sort of doomed heroism to the torpedo planes on the American side here. Because they don't know it, but even if they manage to make this horrifically scary run, right, torpedo planes have to go at almost wave height. They have to line up with the ship and go straight and level for a long time. Which makes you a wonderful sitting duck for both the ship's anti-aircraft and the combat air patrol that's out to get you. Like a bunch of dragonflies amongst gnats. And you've got this heavy torpedo underneath you which makes you lumbering and slow. Alright, but it's worth it, right? If you can get a ship, the problem is that these torpedoes so often fail to explode or run deep. Well, it's amazing how often early in the war these planes will, despite saying that they scored hits, it's going to be the dive bombers that take the toll on the Japanese. But the dive bombers have their way opened up by the torpedo planes. The torpedo planes are kind of like the lead blockers if the lead blockers had to sometimes take a bullet for the running back. Because the torpedo planes, as I said, operating at low level, well that's where the fighters who are defending the fleet go get them, low level. When these dive bombers come in from like 14,000 feet, you can't just as a fighter climb from ground level to 14,000 feet quickly. Take some time and by then the bombs have dropped. So in a sense these torpedo planes, which get massacred in the early battles here, are taking up the attention of the dragonflies so the bombers have a clear running lane to drop their bombs on the Shokaku. And send her careening away on fire. The Americans do not escape unscathed though either and the Japanese find them. They launch an anvil attack, Simon says, which means they're coming in from opposite angles. This shows you their professionalism, how often they've worked together. They may not have attacked carriers like this before, but they've got a lot of experience sinking big ships. And they do it so that no matter which way you turn somebody's going to get you, the Yorktown and the Lexington aircraft carriers are enormous. The Lexington is one of the largest non-nuclear warships ever built. I remembered how long it was because it's easy. It's 888 feet long. Try nimbly turning that monster. That having been said, the Yorktown's not much shorter and yet she is able to nimbly escape I guess like eight torpedoes. And the Japanese torpedoes, as I said, those are not dysfunctional in any way. They are deadly. And a couple of them hit the Lexington. So do a couple of bombs. The problem on all these carriers, this will never get solved in the whole war, although they'll get better as the newer carriers come online, incorporating what these early battles teach them. These things are, I mean, they're bombs and fuel, right? Torpedoes, bombs, and fuel. That's what they carry in planes. Lots of flammable explosive types of things. And so when a fire starts on them, it's extremely dangerous. And that's what these bombs really do. They blow holes in flight decks and they start fires. This is where another non-sexy side of war is going to come into play. When I was a kid, they were still, they remembered these folk and they still remembered the Seabees, the combat engineers who build stuff. They were also always credited with a lot of, you know, sort of under the radar importance in the war effort. The combat crews and the damage control crews on U.S. ships are going to turn out to be one of their real strong points. Their ability to put out fires, prevent ships from listing, their ability to get ships that are out of commission, especially flight decks and flight operations going again, will be make it or break it stuff at several important points. And not just the crews on board, the ability of the crews back at places like Pearl Harbor to get ships up and running quickly are going to be absolutely crucial to the war effort in a way that you could never if you were back in Japan 15 years before the war going, you know, we really have to invest in policies for people to quickly turn around ships if they're injured in wartime. Because the Shokaku is going to go back to Japan and it's going to take some time to get her back in action. And the other ship, the Zuikaku, is also going to go back to Japan because it lost so many pilots in this encounter, which is going to turn out to be another one of those problems. So both of those things are going to be out of commission for a while. The Lexington's going to be out of commission forever because these damage control crews do heroic efforts to basically get the fires under control, get the list under control. The Lexington almost makes it out of there. And then internal explosions start and the ship's doomed. And they actually are able to like their soul. I remember the stories of they would say that the crew was, they knew had so much time they could go down and get whole helmet fulls of ice cream, you know, from the restaurant at the ship and then take it down. You know, as they're getting off the ship, they took their shoes off. I mean, it was a sort of an orderly getting off of the doomed vessel. They sent in a US destroyer that torpedoed it with five torpedoes, at least some of which obviously were functional and sent it to the bottom. Both sides kind of contemplated striking again. The Japanese actually thinking about looking for a night battle, but the end result was both sides sort of pulled away. Now, you never want to trade a fleet carrier like the Lexington for a light carrier like the Shoho. So it's often been portrayed this battle of the Coral Sea as a tactical victory for the Japanese. And by the way, all sides claimed victory exaggerated the enemy's losses and all that kind of stuff in the media and the propaganda. But from a strategic standpoint, the Japanese, at least for now, called off their invasion of Port Mosby, the first time in this whole supernova era that the Japanese have been thwarted in one of their designs. And this also keeps safe that firewall on the south, that line in that direction that the Japanese must not be allowed to cross. But in a month, they're going to test another one of the firewalls, this one, the American's firewall in the Central Pacific. The dead center of the Pacific, kind of, about halfway between North America and Asia. Maybe that's why it's called Midway. In my mind, you know, one of the reasons I disagree with that admiral who said Coral Sea is maybe the most complicated battle ever is because Midway to me looks just as complicated, if not more complicated. It's very hard to follow. And I feel like it actually makes more sense if you simplify it. To me, Midway, this famous legendary battle in the Second World War, one of the really great naval battles, you know, if the suffering and violence and death and everything involved can be called great. To me, it looks like round two of the same fight. The Coral Sea is round one, and then Midway is round two. They're only a month apart from each other. And the time spent apart reminds me of what a boxer does when they go back to their corner and they get sponged down and stitched up and you go and break down, okay, here's what the other guy's been doing to you. And then they clash again. This is again the non-sexy stuff, but the Yorktown, which is damaged at Coral Sea and is supposed to be out for months, goes back to Pearl Harbor. They do the equivalent of calling on Scotty for impulse power, we need it. And they send the Yorktown within 48 hours with welders still working on it to war to meet up with the force that's going to ambush the Japanese again at Midway the same way they did at Coral Sea. There's an interesting line in one of the history books I read that said that it's intriguing that the Japanese high command never really wondered, at least, and I haven't found anything that said they did, about what the heck the American carriers were doing at just the right place in Coral Sea. Because the Americans are going to do the same thing at Midway. They're going to have the same people, it's going to be the same crypto analysts like Rochefort, he's going to be one of these guys again who tells them, he even does a ruse to try to make sure he knows what they're talking about, he tells the high command they're going to attack Midway. Midway Island, which if you actually look at it on a satellite map, calling it an island is a gross exaggeration. It is two small little spits of reef right next to each other. One of them is a little more than 1100 acres, I think, the other is more like 350. The two current airfields on the two atolls take up more than half the atoll space. These are islands that are important because of where they are and the fact that they're big enough to put airfields on, or airfield on each one. So the Japanese are going to take it. What does this do? Well a bunch of things, and the Japanese are sort of divided as to what they want here. Once again the buck doesn't seem to stop anywhere, and strategy has often decided that these liaison conferences where the army leaders and the navy leaders and the emperor and there's haggling and it's a strange way, they cobble together something here. There's going to be apparently the largest, I think this is the largest Japanese naval effort up until this time ever, in multiple columns, including an attack on Aleutian Islands, Atu and Kiska I think it is, and that may be a concession to the army who wanted the defense perimeter out here. Going to attack the island of Midway in order to extend, some of these people in Japan want the defense perimeter expanded. This is where fans of the Doolittle raid will point out that this is because of the Doolittle raid. Nobody wants to see Japan bombed again, hence we will move the defense perimeter farther away giving us more space between us and the Americans, more room to detect their attacks, more space to launch countermeasures. So you have a good argument for expanding the defense perimeter in that direction even if it extends our lines of communication even farther. It looks like Admiral Yamamoto, the mastermind of Pearl Harbor as he's always known, looks like he may have had another idea here. And he may have had to work out deals in the haggling with the liaison conference and the army and all this sort of stuff and even within his own service to get his way, maybe even a little prima donna activity there, threaten to resign. But like a lot of aggressive admirals out there, especially guys who happen to favor the decisive battle school of naval thinking and there are many of those in many different navies around the world, the idea of just sitting back and creating a defensive corridor to protect yourself from things like American aircraft carrier attacks seems like the wrong way to go about it. Why don't you just go get those American carriers and solve the problem right there? You already knocked out the battleship fleet at Pearl Harbor, why not just sink those aircraft carriers somewhere where the water is nice and deep and you won't recover them the way the US is trying to raise some of those battleships at Pearl Harbor. The histories paint Yamamoto as a guy who sees midway, just like we explained New Guinea, a firewall, something the Americans would think was a line in the sand and that if he threatened or took it, they would come out and fight for it. And then he could sink those carriers in deep water. He's got a mathematical equation going on in his head. He understands, Yamamoto, a lot of the navy guys really understand the American industrial capability. He knows the Japanese are currently building one new aircraft carrier. And remember, they take a couple of years, the Japanese take longer than the Americans to build these things. So they got one in the pipeline, they won't actually get a new purpose built aircraft carrier instead of a conversion until 1944. The Americans by the end of 1942 are going to be working on like five of them at the same time. So if you're Yamamoto, you have a superiority in aircraft carrier numbers right now. You want to mow the lawn or cut the grass. You want to whittle American strength down now while your superior, maybe cut their carrier force here by three fourths or get lucky and sink all of them. And then continue to sink the American carriers in battles as they come off the assembly lines. It's the only way to maintain your superiority. Even if you could just mow the lawn once in this case, you would buy the Japanese unbelievably important time. Time to consolidate this defense perimeter, you know, at air bases, stock with, I mean, it would just be why you get the resource chain going that you've just conquered. The Japanese had been planning this since before the Coral Sea battle that had taken place in May and to lose the services of your two newest and most modern fleet carriers, the ones that were damaged or who lost planes, the Zuikaku and the Shokaku, to lose their participation in what's about to come is going to turn out to be one of those things you look back on and go, wow, that might have made a difference. But they should take their place behind all of the other things that might have made a difference. This battle is going to be uncharacteristically sloppy on both Yamamoto and the Japanese side. Unexpected. You look at how they conducted themselves in the first phase of this whole supernova in the east, you know, initial expansion and everything, the Pearl Harbor attacks. I mean, those are intricately planned, wonderful, clever, elegant military things. The training, I mean, everything. This is going to be much more haphazard. And Masanori Ito in his book from the 1950s, the end of the Imperial Japanese Navy's, the American title, had said that every estimate was bad, every guess wrong. I think that's his way of saying what's about to happen is going to be a perfect example, one of the good military examples, although there's a million of them, of Murphy's law. Right? Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. It helps if you don't plan for certain things and you're not flexible. This Japanese assault, an assault it is it's going to be an invasion of Midway Island, right? The small little atolls. It's going to involve a fleet that is huge, involves four aircraft carriers, four main fleet aircraft carriers, then battleships in another one, they're going to be divided into into columns. So they're separated. So think about different fleets, they're really five or six of them. And they're going to be stretched out over a huge length. The ones in the far north are going to be landing on Alaskan islands, Attu, Kiska, things like that. That's a weird part of this whole thing, too. When I was growing up, we used to we were taught that these were diversions. Nowadays, it's thought that this is maybe a concession to the army and this is going to be the northern wing of the defense perimeter. Whatever it is, it's been criticized by military historians ever since as a as a needless diversion of force. And again, weirdly enough, the Japanese columns here, these different fleets are too far away from one another to be of much help. The basics of the plan are that there's going to be an invasion of these atolls, the Midway Island atolls by land troops. There are going to be American defenders on the island, there's an airfield, so you got to take those things out. So the aircraft carriers, the four aircraft carriers that are part of the main strike force, the fleet carriers are going to go in there and bomb the heck out of it. Their orders are to to prepare the way for the land invasion so that that can succeed. But they have another order, and that is to sink any American carriers that they find. Which order takes precedence? Well, they're still debating this while they're approaching the destination. This is how strange the whole thing seems. And there's going to be a lot of problems with the Japanese plan. They're going to be over complexifying, if you'll pardon the misuse of the language, over complexifying the whole thing, which is a problem they have. Their plans when they work out look like pocket watches in terms of the precision and the interlocking mechanisms all coming into place at the same time. And that's how the first phase of the supernova part of the war went. Their problem is an inflexibility when something doesn't go according to plan. And in a bunch of times in this operation, something's going to be, for example, late. And when it's late, if it turns out to be a very important part of the operation, this will jeopardize the operation unless the operation accounts for this. We're going to change the plans a little bit. That submarine's not at the rendezvous point to use reconnaissance efforts, you know, and make sure the American fleet's not coming. If you don't change your plans, things get a little ragged. If several of these things happen and you don't change your plans, things can get very ragged. The worst part, of course, from the Japanese standpoint is they're walking into another trap, the second one in like a month. First you don't succeed, try, try again. We mentioned earlier that the Yorktown, the aircraft carrier damaged at Coral Sea by a Herculean effort with welders still on board, steams to the rendezvous point. The rendezvous point is a place where in the war games, the Japanese war gamer who would put the, he was playing the Americans, he put the fleet there in the war game and the judge who works for Admiral Yamamoto apparently said, sorry, you can't put a fleet there. That's unrealistic. It's one of those things where you go, what? You mean they war gamed? If you want to get granular on this, people have debated every little moment of this encounter ad nauseum, but it does kind of suck you in. It's fascinating. This is a moment by moment kind of conflict that's about to happen here because it's the, you know, we'd mentioned how naval warfare nowadays is so quick and so deadly. Welcome to modern naval warfare. You got a taste of it at the Coral Sea. You're going to get more than you can stomach here, especially if you're Japanese. Personally, while there's a lot of errors you can attribute to the Japanese, let's not, not notice that this is a pretty beautiful little plan here from a military standpoint. The intelligence puts the US in a position where they can hide three fleet carriers sort of behind and above. If you're looking at it on a map, the island of Midway, use the Midway reconnaissance to find the Japanese carriers and sort of keep their carriers out of range of the Japanese scout planes. That's kind of nifty. Eventually you're going to have to get within range, but for a while you're, you're more invisible to them than they are to you. And as we had said earlier, the whole carrier thing at this point and confirmed by the Coral Sea battle a month before seems to be find them before they find you find them before they can launch their own strike force, right? That's a nifty part of the plan as is being able to use Midway as another aircraft carrier. If you've got three fleet carriers for this battle, which the Americans do, and the Japanese have four fleet carriers, well, you can use Midway to make up for one of those. So the odds are then even. Midway is not maneuverable like a carrier, but it can't be sunk either. So maybe those things even out. But what the Americans are doing is they've used the intelligence to set a trap and they're lying in wait for the Japanese who think once again that they're the ones ambushing someone. On June 4th, Nagumo launches an airstrike first thing in the morning at Midway Island. The airstrikes job is to take out, as we said, the ability for the island to launch planes to take out defensive stuff so that the amphibious assault force can land. He's got about half his planes though in reserve. He doesn't send those. He arms them with torpedoes, which are specifically ship killing ordinance. Whereas these planes going after the island, the Midway are mostly armed with high explosive bombs, right? Different ordinance for different targets. And when Nagumo's strike force carrier aircraft in a huge wave of aircraft get to Midway, instead of finding the Americans with their planes parked on the runway, you know, unprepared, they find the American air assets in the air waiting for them. John Toland in the Rising Sun was talking about what an open secret it was amongst Americans that the intelligence had perhaps been compromised and that this was a trap and that they were part of setting it. He talks about the scuttlebutt on the US aircraft carriers amongst the sailors were saying that. And he quotes Admiral Spruance as saying that he thought that the next day, this day, June 4th, would be the most important in US naval history. The Japanese strike force does a significant amount of damage to Midway, but doesn't seem to have inhibited the aircraft capability, among other things. And Nagumo gets the message from his aircraft strike leader that he recommends another strike on the island. This puts Nagumo on the horns of a dilemma from which he will not escape. Because his job is twofold, right? To knock out this island and to sink any American carriers. He's got half his aircraft sitting around doing nothing with torpedoes just in case he runs into some American carriers, but he hadn't found any yet, so what do you do? I feel for Nagumo at this point. This is where you realize that the speed of the battle is going to be. Naval warfare has always been kind of quick and deadly. It's always been thought of that way. They never thought it was slow and easy, but Nagumo is 55 years old. When this stuff starts cascading on him quickly, I love the way in Shattered Sword they look at all the, like I said, they get granular on this, but they point out that the bridge on the ship that he commands, they give the dimensions, the size dimensions of it. How many people would have been in the room with him? In other words, the whole point of getting into it is this guy's got no physical space in which to think. So not only does he not have time, he's got no sense where he can just, let me think for a minute, let me think for a minute. And everything's going to happen so amazingly quickly. I just think about how disorienting it would have been. His problem starts though with arming the planes. And if you're a nut about Midway, this is the big deal, right? What are the planes armed with and what do we change to? Right? So here's the way a naval historian Craig L. Simons describes part of this dilemma. And the real problem starts not when he has to decide, do I go after this island or do I not go after this island again? Because that's all predicated on, well, there's no American fleet. So what's the problem when they find the American fleet?
SPEAKER_02: Another one of these wonderful little serendipitous moments in the battle of Midway. The American fleet is spotted by a reconnaissance plane from the Japanese cruiser Tone. This plane took off 30 minutes late. Now you think to yourself, hey, no big deal. It probably wasn't going to be the plane that sighted the American carriers on its search route, right? What are the odds? Well, it was. And when it sighted the American carriers, sighted them about 30 minutes later than it otherwise would have, that's kind of a big deal. What's more, instead of the pilot radioing back, we found the American carriers, quick launch everything, he said we found a bunch of American ships. To which Nagumo then had to go, ships? What kind of ships? I mean, what are we talking about here? So ask him what kind of ships? Asks him what kind of ships? The message comes back and then he finds out at least one aircraft carrier. Naval historian Craig L. Simons picks up the story from there and what a bombshell that must have been. That changed everything. And Nagumo now had to decide what to do with this startling information. He could order the anti-ship ordinance put back on the planes and prepare an immediate attack on this American carrier. That, after all, was his primary mission. The problem was that by now, Tominanga's planes, that's the man who just struck Midway with the strike force, Tominanga's planes were returning from the strike on Midway and they needed to land. So too did the Zeros that had been flying combat air patrol all morning and were running low on fuel. Nagumo could not recover and launch planes at the same time. He had to choose. Because he did not like doing things by halves, he decided to recover Tominanga's planes as well as the circling Zeros, then refuel and rearm all of them for a coordinated strike on the American carrier, or perhaps carriers. All that would take time, of course, but Nagumo believed he had time enough. He didn't.
SPEAKER_03: End quote.
SPEAKER_02: When I grew up, there was a blockbuster Hollywood film about Midway with big stars, and there's been another one since. I think the Japanese have a film on it. It's one of these sorts of events that as a kid growing up, you get a sort of a sense of a rhythm for. And looking on it now with the good history books that have been written since and whatnot, I have a different feel for it. It doesn't feel anymore like it felt when the movies were telling the story to me. And I have a sense of maybe that being something the screenwriters needed or the filmmakers needed to set pacing and to provide breaks when there could be dialogue and drama between characters. I get it, but it screwed up my sense of the timing. And if you go look at the timeline of this from, say, a Japanese sailor's perspective, and I went and looked at a bunch of them, and they all they can be a little different from each other, but the general tone is the same. It doesn't look like there really was a lot of break once the attacks started. Maybe a little time here or there, but when you consider the chaos any of these attacks would have created in the adrenaline and the cleanup or the casualties or whatever it might be. I don't think any of these had casualties, but you don't know that until you survive it. I don't think you would have felt like there was much of a break. I think the prevailing attitude on the Japanese sailors part would have been something more akin to, oh no, here they come again. Right? Just when you think you can relax and have a cigarette. Oh no, more planes in the distance. So check out this timeline and tell me if it doesn't feel a little like that too. The Japanese, by the way, will be found. The strike force will be found by an American reconnaissance pilot who will break through the clouds, see the strike force of like four fleet carriers, two battleships, two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, 12 destroyers, 250 combat planes, and it's just one of the many different fleets that are part of this overall Japanese offensive stretching all the way to those Alaskan islands. And he said it was like the curtain rising on the biggest show on earth. So he goes and radios back, found the Japanese fleet basically, and within an hour and a half or hour and 35 minutes, the Japanese are facing their first American aircraft. Right? So as soon as they could get up and out there, they were on them. And the Americans will almost no time in this combat develop a giant swarm of aircraft all at once and then launch it all at the enemy. The Japanese prefer to do it that way. The Americans might prefer to do it that way, but there are many decisions made commander wise in this combat. Admiral Spruance will make a couple of them. One will be launching from too far away and just taking his chances, right? Not waiting for an optimal time, trying to get a jump time wise on the enemy. The other will be sending his planes in small groups as they get going, right? Don't wait around to concentrate. The Americans took a lot longer to launch than the very efficient and experienced Japanese carriers did. But don't wait 45 minutes till we're all up in the air in one swarm. You know, as you launch, you should concentrate in a small group and go. And they did, which means that the Americans were arriving all morning long and they would get lost. Some of these planes. The problem with this story is if you want to tell it best and most accurately, you need to, this is a war between beehives and you need to follow small groups of bees. You need to be in Luke Skywalker's plane, Red Leader One, Red Leader Four, you know, because that's what's going on here. But it makes the story unbelievably complex and turns it into a bunch of vignettes when really, if you're the Japanese sailor, at 7.10am, the first American planes from the island of Midway show up and you're under almost constant attack. The rhythm I feel now is not like the movie rhythm. The rhythm I feel now is like the Americans are trying to strike a match and the Japanese are trying to blow the match out. And you get strike, strike, strike, strike, strike, and eventually it lights. 7.10am, the Japanese are struck by American aircraft from Midway. The Japanese basically take no damage from these planes, but their zeros get up there, they're fighting, they're using fuel, they're taking damage. So these attacks all count, the ships are all doing evasive maneuvers, everybody's adrenaline is up, everybody's wide-eyed and aware. So 7.10am, you get your first attack. 7.55am, 45 minutes later, another one from the island of Midway. These are all 15, 16, 12 numbers of planes. A lot of them are high-level bombers too, all different kinds. So 7.10am, your first. 7.55am, your second. 8.10am, 15 minutes later, another one. 8.20am, 10 minutes after that, another one. 9.25am, so an hour, get a little break and a chance to have a cigarette. Talk about what just happened. 4.05 minutes later, boom, first carrier planes show up. Torpedo bombers, the ones that are real shipkillers. Now neither the Americans nor the Japanese realize that these torpedo bombers are really not going to do anything. You can't play it that way and you might be able to argue that the reason the American torpedo planes didn't do anything was because of all the Japanese countermeasures, right? But the first torpedo planes show up at 9.25am. 5 minutes later, torpedo planes from another American carrier show up. 10 o'clock, half hour after that, more torpedo planes from yet another American carrier show up. 10.25, 25 minutes after that, the dive bombers show up almost serendipitously at the same time from multiple directions and the war changes. The moments before the US dive bombers, which were unquestionably the best American carrier planes that they had going at this time, better than the fighters, much, much, much better than the torpedo planes. Before the American dive bombers showed up, this was looking a bit like a Japanese victory here. I have difficulty finding a more consequential 15 minutes in military history anywhere than what happens from 10.25am for the next 5, 10, 15 minutes of time. Historian Craig L. Simons talks about the Japanese before the dive bombers show up and how they've been ripping apart all the American aircraft and the torpedo planes most of all. He writes, quote, Only minutes later, the torpedo bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown arrived, and they too were overwhelmed by the zeros. Of 41 torpedo bombers launched by the American carriers that morning, only 4 made it back to their ships. And despite that horrific sacrifice, none of them managed to hit an enemy ship with a torpedo. Counting the bombers from Midway, the Americans had now sent 94 airplanes to attack the Japanese. All but a handful had been shot down, and none of them had managed to land either a bomb or a torpedo on any Japanese ship. At 10.20 in the morning on June 4, 1942, Nagumo had reason to believe he was winning the battle. To complete the victory, he needed to finish the transfer of ordnance down on the hangar deck, bring his planes up to the flight deck, and send them off to destroy the American carriers. None of Nagumo's vessels had radar, he writes, so it was one of the many lookouts on board the flagship Akagi who pointed skyward at 10.22 am and screamed out, I believe it is Kuyukoka, which means dive bombers. End quote.
SPEAKER_02: Simon's book, I love his writing, that moment when the dive bombers are spotted is famous. There were eyewitnesses who survived the war and wrote about it. One of the things that some of the modern histories prove is once again you can't always trust an eyewitness just because they were there. They misremember things, they romanticize things, you know, it happens. There's nothing new about any of this, right? This is what historians spend a lot of time doing, isn't it? Taking the most precious things they have to work with, primary sources, and if you're super lucky, eyewitness accounts, and then trying to figure out how much of it you can trust and how much is real and how you filter out the biases and how even the biases might teach you something. But you gotta have something to plug in for X to get the whole calculation going. You gotta love the primary sources. There's a bunch of interesting survivors from this event. On the Japanese side, one of them is the guy who actually led the first raid of planes into Pearl Harbor about seven months before this time, the flight leader.
SPEAKER_02: Mitsuo Fuchida is his name. I think we mentioned him earlier. We should have if we didn't. He's on board one of these carriers when the strike happens and he gives you an eyewitness account, an eyewitness account that becomes something that was originally transmitted as accurate to 100%. I mean, this is an eyewitness. He saw everything that happened. Now it's been used and torn apart and re-put together. I mean, it's been analyzed nine ways to Sunday. And a bunch of the specifics that he talks about aren't true, but it doesn't matter. If you plug your little tube into the back of his head and suck out some of those memories, it's the fire and explosions and what happens to him in the sense of disbelief where that's what stays with you. And the emotions on the other side are shocking too because we're not in war anymore. And you forget how much there's hate involved here and a sense of almost tears running down your face. Revenge, right? You're getting what you have coming. The Japanese have been throwing all the punches, as we said, in this war. At Coral Sea, the Americans had given them their first loss of a ship larger than a destroyer that they'd suffered in the whole war, but they've still come off relatively unscathed. They've been doing great damage. There's a lot of anger. I mean, Eugene Sledge, later in the war, I heard him say once he's a Marine that there was a crying, screaming Japanese wounded soldier outside his Marines position and the group wanted to finish him off just so they could get some mental peace. And another person in the group said, forget that, let him keep screaming. They killed my brother at Pearl Harbor. I like the sound of that.
SPEAKER_02: And you forget about that, but when you hear about the account from the person who dropped the first of these bombs on these Japanese carriers, that's what he was thinking about. He was thinking about payback. It's the most natural thing in the world, isn't it? These are the ships that hit Pearl Harbor. These are the pilots on these ships that did the act. To the Americans of this time period, this for them is the equivalent of what it would have felt like getting Osama Bin Laden. Right? There is a sense of payback of all paybacks here, what's going to happen. And this narrative, by the way, picks up after the last of the torpedo planes have been eliminated. I think it's about two to three minutes. The timeline is all different, like I said, between the last of the torpedo attacks that I think started at 10 a.m. officially are done and the beginning of the dive bomber attacks. That's where the story picks up. And Fuchida, the guy who led the first wave into Pearl Harbor, watched it from an absolutely target's eye view. Mitsuo Fuchida remembered, quote, Visibility was good. Clouds were gathering at about 3,000 meters, however, and though there were occasional breaks, they afforded good concealment for approaching enemy planes. At 10 24, the order to start launching came from the bridge by voice tube. He means of his aircraft carrier's own planes, by the way. That's what he's talking about there. He continues, the air officer flapped a white flag and the first zero fighter gathered speed and whizzed off the deck. At that instant, a lookout screamed, hell divers. Those are American planes. I looked up to see three black enemy planes plummeting towards our ship. Some of our machine guns managed to fire a few frantic bursts at them, but it was too late. The plump silhouettes of the American dauntless dive bombers quickly grew larger, and then a number of black objects suddenly floated eerily from their wings. Bombs. Down they came, straight towards me. I fell instinctively to the deck and crawled behind a command post mantlet. The terrifying scream of the dive bombers reached me first, followed by the crashing explosion of a direct hit. There was a blinding flash and then a second explosion, much louder than the first. I was shaken by a weird blast of warm air. There was still another shock, but less severe, apparently a near miss. Then followed a startling quiet as the barking of the gun suddenly ceased. I got up and looked at the sky. The enemy planes were already out of sight. Think of how quickly something like that just happened. He continues, by the way, to give you a sense of the situation on board. And this has been roundly broken down by experts. How much of these things happened the way the eyewitnesses said they did. But let's understand what's going to happen on all these ships. It's going to all seem a little bit like this. Fuchita says, quote, I was horrified at the destruction that had been wrought in a matter of seconds. There was a huge hole in the flight deck, just behind the amidship elevator. The elevator itself, twisted like molten glass, was drooping into the hangar. Deck plates reeled upward in grotesque configurations. Planes stood tail up, belching livid flame and jet black smoke. Reluctant tears streamed down my cheeks as I watched the fires spread and I was terrified at the prospect of induced explosions, which would surely doom the ship. End quote. Again, to the Americans, this would have been an exultant moment. And John Toland in the Rising Sun describes the feelings of one of these dive bombers who went in there and delivered this damage. This, by the way, is the remembrance of Lieutenant Wilmer Earl Gallagher as recounted in Toland's The Rising Sun. And Gallagher is one of the first guys comes in there, sees carriers, goes for it from almost a straight down dive, according to eyewitnesses. A perfect pro-maneuver type dive bomber. This didn't look like the Coral Sea where things were... these were professionals, the people on board the Japanese ships thought. And Toland writes, quote, As I said, to the Americans at this time period, it would have seemed like this was the most exquisitely sweet sort of justice. You surprised attacked us. You did all these nasty things in the Far East. You've had it your way the whole time. This is our wrestler analogy, our professional wrestler analogy, where the little guy at Pearl Harbor went after the big guy, the popular hero, when his back was turned before the bell was rung and there's always the turning point in that storyline, as you probably know. When all of a sudden the big guy shakes the cobwebs out, turns around and issues a big match turning blow or two on the little guy and now everything's going to be different. These American dive bombers come in here and within a few minutes, I'll have three of these Japanese carriers on fire and burning, two of them out of control infernos. It is stunning. I just compared this to an Osama bin Laden 9-11 moment. If you live through that and you can remember it, you remember the sense of disbelief in something happening this quickly that was this substantial. You couldn't really get your mind around it. Of these four Japanese aircraft carriers, the one that avoids getting hit here, the Hiryu, in Shattered Sword, the remembrances of that captain are recounted at this moment where he just couldn't believe what his eyes were seeing. We have to imagine that these carriers were a couple miles apart from each other, but you can see them like torches on the naval horizon. I like the way, and it's a great book, but you really have to want to know a lot about Midway. It's called Shattered Sword. We referenced it earlier, I believe. Jonathan Parchel and Anthony Tully break the whole thing down like a Kennedy assassination investigation. From Shattered Sword, quote, To the north, on Hiryu's bridge, there were collective moans as Kaga burst into flames and began smoking heavily. Hiryu had tried to warn her, but it had all been for nothing. Her navigator, Commander Cho, later remarked, quote, now quoting Commander Cho, It was like a horrible dream in slow motion, to see such a great carrier done in this easily, end quote. Jonathan Parchel and Anthony Tully continue. Almost immediately, though, the lookout started screaming in a loud voice that Soryu and Akagi were under attack as well. Afraid that the man's near hysterical demeanor would be bad for morale, Cho snapped at him to quiet down and use a lower voice. He could see, though, that the man was right. Cho tried to stay focused on driving Hiryu out of danger, that the torpedo plane attack was still coming in, but it was useless. Everyone on the bridge was stunned into insensibility by the magnitude of the attack, end quote. One of the things I like about the granular approach like Shattered Sword, earlier they described the size of the thinking space that the Japanese admiral would have in this situation. The 55 year old guy who's watching all this unfold this quickly. Then they talk about things like how flammable these ships are. The quote that stood out was they said World War II era warships were marvelously flammable, and then went down the list of why. And they were talking about all warships in general initially, and then they specifically started talking about aircraft carriers. In the Pacific, the British have armored flight decks, but the Americans and the Japanese have wood ones, beautiful wood ones that burn wonderfully. They also have, of course, lots of aircraft fuel. They have bombs, they have torpedoes. These Japanese warships are carrying on average about 80,000 pounds of torpedoes, bombs, and stuff like that. So any fires on any of these ships is a huge, huge and imminent issue. It sounds like the situation on two of the Japanese carriers was bad instantly. I mean the Kaga has its sides blown out because of everything just exploding. There's talk of cascading rivers of burning aircraft fuel tumbling off one level of the ship down into a hole. These are infernos. Again, the number of people that are dying on these warships and burning, it's a disaster. And as we said with this Commander Cho line that we just used, there's a sense of shock. How do you respond to this? The speed at which this occurred will change. I mean, this is what you're watching here is one of the great revolutions in military affairs demonstrated in real time in front of everyone. Everyone had started to have an inkling. We mentioned earlier when the first two battleships were sunk, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales by Japanese aircraft in December. And then you get Coral Sea. Now you get this. This is the exclamation point that says, nobody needs to build battleships ever again. Nobody needs to worry about big guns on their ships maybe ever again. That's not how war is ever going to be fought again. This is going to be done with swarms of bees from a distance where these fleets can't even see each other and you better have radar or you are going to be at a huge disadvantage. I said earlier, it's hard to imagine anything short of an atomic weapons use in a war that was undecided, where things could be so radically altered in such a short period of time. And people argue, it used to be, the myth used to be that within five minutes, the whole thing, the whole war was changed. And this was in large part because of what eyewitnesses said. Again, later historians have broken certain things down and figured out that certain myths existed. I mean, what kills poor Nagumo here, and we talked about it earlier, is he gets caught with his planes in transition. Instead of having attack planes up and ready to go get these carriers, we talked about it. He's divided between, okay, do I attack the island or do I do rearm with torpedoes or do I need armor-piercing bombs or do I need high explosives? I mean, it's famous. Now in the old days, it was assumed that it was just like a lucky five-minute window there where he was vulnerable. And that's when the Americans showed up. In more modern things, they say that this window was probably more like 45 minutes. And that explains why the American admiral, Spruance, who was pushing this whole thing, decided to launch when he did. He was hoping to catch the Japanese sort of in mid-transition, right? Landing some, refueling, rearming, but not up there waiting for him. And that's exactly what happened. And instead of being able to mow the lawn so that the Japanese could maintain a naval superiority over a quickly building United States Navy, they ended up being the ones whose grass was cut. Because the first five or ten minutes of this battle of midway strike that we just recounted is so famous and so consequential, people have been talking about it forever. We may have said, but let's repeat it now just in case, that this is Kennedy assassination-esque in its level of detail and vitriol and the many viewpoints and continuing controversies over this whole thing and I'm not qualified to weigh in on it. I mean, was there a magic five minutes? Or was it more like 45 minutes, right? I've always thought it didn't make a whole lot of sense for admiral Spruance to take any other chances and launch a strike early in the hopes of catching the Japanese in transition. If that transition window was so dang narrow, right? You need like three quarters of an hour to even have a chance, I would think. But I could have my timing wrong on that also. Then there's the question of where the Japanese planes, this is what I grew up with, by the way, where the Japanese planes on all these flight decks crowding, you know, every little bit of space, just about ready to take off for the American carriers fully armed with weapons to take them down. But just to make it better, with the ordinance they were previously armed with stacked right nearby, because they're changing all the time, that was part of the whole thing here, and they didn't have time to take it below deck. So it's right there too. So you go from having a bomb situation to a double bomb situation. And then, you know, just to make matters worse, it's an aircraft carrier with lots of gasoline hoses everywhere and spilled gasoline and they're basically, you know, fuel air bombs waiting to go off. And then just as luck would have it in that five minute window when the only time it could do this, the American dive bombers appear and set the things on fire. It just, again, seems a little too good and too Hollywood to be true, but there are eyewitness accounts that say it is. So I'm not going to weigh in on that except to say that count me as a believer that World War II era warships are marvelously flammable and aircraft carriers, triply so, they always are a bit like torches ready to be lit. And so when these dive bombers show up, whenever these dive bombers show up, it's a big deal. And the two carriers, the Kaga and the Soryu, the Soryu may have had like planes ready. I mean, it's bad at the Soryu right away. The Kaga, we said the sides blow up, but I think that happens after a little while. But the fires that get going are unstoppable. And in the Akagi, which is the flagship, the carrier with Nagumo on it, right? I mean, it's one thing to be Commander Cho going, what the hell's going on? It's another thing to be Nagumo, the guy who's in charge in his little teeny cabin, too small to think crammed with people, 55 years old, this unfolding. It's five, 10 minutes, folks, from beginning to end once the dive bombers are involved. And it never really stopped from the torpedo planes to the dive bombers. So this guy has been mentally buffeted quite a bit. And all these ships are taking evasive maneuvers. So it's this crazy situation trying to scatter and avoid the air attacks. And there is no time to react. And Nagumo seems in shock. We didn't even get into that. I mean, the cabin's burning around him because Akagi gets on fire and they fight the fires for hours and they just lose. But the flames at one point are leaping around the enclosure in the bridge and they're trying to get Nagumo off. Here's what John Toland in The Rising Sun writes about this moment. Over again. Thousands of gallons of burning fuel cascaded into the lower decks and torpedoes stored in the hangers began detonating. Blasts of fire shot through the sides of the ship like a huge blowtorch. Nagumo still refused to leave his position at the compass. End quote.
SPEAKER_02: There are a lot of stories about Japanese commanders on these ships and higher officers deliberately choosing to go down with the ship or having to be wrestled away. One of them is holding up a sword and singing the Japanese national anthem and he won't leave the bridge. Some of these guys tie themselves, you know, to things on the bridge. They go down. There's another story that reminds you of sort of the cherry blossom sublime Japanese idea of the beauty of death. At least in an American B-movie version interpretation of it when one of these commanders or officers puts his arm around another one who's decided to die with him. And says something to the effect of, you know, it's a beautiful moon out tonight. Shall we watch it go down together or something to that? I mean, where you're trying to sort of, I mean, there's just that interesting Japanese idea of death that comes forward. And it's both foreign to non-Japanese people in some respects but touches a deeper human part of your soul when you think about human beings in that position. And how would you behave? You certainly would probably want a little revenge, wouldn't you? And if there's anything worse than losing three aircraft carriers in ten minutes or however long it was, losing four would seem to qualify. Because there are four fleet carriers that the Japanese have outside of Midway and one of them is undamaged, the Hiryu. And again within fifteen minutes to a half hour the Hiryu has launched, let's call it a revenge strike against American carriers wherever they may be. We'd said earlier that this is like a fight at the OK Corral between gunfighters. And even if you shoot the other one as they're falling into the dust, they can loose a bullet off at you. And sort of avenge their brethren from almost beyond the grave. Here the Hiryu launches an attack that I think the story is it homes its way back following one of the very planes that bombed it from the Yorktown. How revenge-like is that? You're going to get the exact carrier that did this to this famous, this historically famous Japanese fleet. The Kido Butai, the Mobile Strike Force, the ones that hit Pearl Harbor, the ones that have done all these great deeds so far in Japanese history. And these pilots who would have been getting altitude off the flight deck of the Hiryu would have had an amazing historical, literally bird's eye view of history, wouldn't they? Looking out and seeing three smoking carriers out of four. And knowing that you know people, especially pilots on those carriers. Pilots who are going to have nowhere to land. Especially if something happens to the Hiryu. The Akagi is burning. There are hopes that it can get underway, and it does for a few minutes and get going again. But fires take that over. So these pilots who are heading towards what will turn out to be the one ship that busted its rear end after fighting in the Coral Sea, still damaged, workmen still on board, just to make it here and add some strength to the undamaged carriers as the one the Japanese find. The Yorktown. And get to take out their feelings of anger on that carrier. There are, according to Francis Pike in Hirohito's War, sailors on the Yorktown who see these Japanese planes and these pilots who are attacking the Yorktown are shaking their fists at them from the cockpit. There's a, you know, we had said earlier there was this moment for the American pilot, you know, Arizona, I remember you, right? This sense of wonderfully appropriate revenge, almost tears in your eyes level revenge. It's a feeling most people don't feel very often, if ever. It's interesting to note the Japanese could be doing the same thing right now. You can imagine their pilots instead of saying Arizona, I remember you, saying Kaga, I remember you, or Soryu, the sister ship by the way of the Hiryu, I remember you, or some pilot that they knew personally, I remember you. When the first wave of the Hiryu's retaliatory strike comes upon the Yorktown, it finds that the Yorktown is waiting for it. Its onboard radar has given it advance notice, and it's had time to get its own screen of fighters, a defensive screen into the sky. It's had time to get everyone manning the anti-aircraft guns. It's had time to batten down the hatches, so to speak, when it comes to flammable things on deck, you know, pushing over giant barrels of fuel and everything. And it's had time, non-sexy stuff here, to pump carbon dioxide gas into all its fuel lines. It's not armor, won't stop you from getting hit, but it might stop a hit from turning into a critical hit in like five seconds. These are all the sorts of precautions the Japanese wish they could have taken that same morning, right? They didn't have the advance notice. So when the Japanese first wave shows up, timeline's bedeviling me a little bit, you know, between maybe 2 and 2.30 in the afternoon, 18 dive bombers, six Zero fighters, the Americans are up in the sky and they're waiting. And here once again, though, the Japanese pilots I've been raving about will show just why they're so good. I mean, the Zeroes expertly occupy the American fighters, so the dive bombers could go get the American aircraft carrier, and they do. In another nifty piece of flying, they put three bombs on her. Bam! The Yorktown is belching smoke, the boilers are damaged, as far as the Japanese pilots are concerned, the Yorktown looks just like three out of four of their carriers do. And that's what they tell the people on the HIRU, they've got an American carrier, it's burning. Basically meaning it's done. In one of the ironies of this whole battle, the damage control people on the Yorktown, who are not only good, but after Coral Sea they've had real experience, and they've got those extra workers from Pearl Harbor still on board, they manage to patch up the damage. There's a hole in the flight deck, and they patch it, and they've got air operations going again, they get their speed back up, it's crazy. But they're kind of a victim of their own success. Because after the Japanese knock out that carrier, they're not looking to find the same carrier again, they're looking for an undamaged carrier. So when the second wave arrives from the HIRU, and it's a couple hours later, they find what they think is an undamaged carrier and go after it. It's not an undamaged carrier, it's a carrier that's been so well repaired by its damage control crew that the Japanese torpedo planes can't tell it's damaged. I mean, how great is it? And remember, that's a carrier that was damaged already when it showed up in this battle. It's a weird twist of history that had they not been as good at their job, and a little smoke had been pouring out of the top of the Yorktown, she might have been spared. Instead, she takes two torpedoes, one blows a huge hole in her side. The ship starts to list something like 26 degrees or something, and they just figure, you know, these things have a big old heavy flight deck on top, capsize seems imminent, they take everybody off, and she still doesn't sink. So I think it's the next day, June 5th, they tow her, they start taking her back to Pearl Harbor. She's like the ship that you can't kill, gonna have this interesting reputation of fix her up, send her back out to sea, sell a lot of war bombs, right? Instead, the ending is anticlimactic as a Japanese submarine weaves its way through the destroyer screen and puts several torpedoes into the Yorktown. And that's the end of that. The ship that you couldn't kill almost seems like it was destined one way or another not to survive this battle, because it kept finding itself in the way of the enemy, in the thick of everything. The battle's not done though, because at the end of the day, somewhere around like the five o'clock hour when afternoon, late afternoon transitions into early evening, the Americans find the last Japanese carrier, the Hiryu. And they essentially do to the Hiryu what had been done to all the other Japanese carriers and turn it into a torch, a burning wreck. And it is somewhat interesting that these aircraft carriers proved to be a little difficult to sink sometimes, but not difficult at all to light on fire. And I think that the Japanese actually are the ones ultimately responsible for sinking all four of these carriers. I think they have to torpedo them eventually. The Hiryu at one point is just sort of like smoking and drifting. There are some postscript activities to the Midway battle and the Japanese will lose a cruiser and Yamamoto will try to force a night attack. None of it matters. As far as history is concerned, the damage has been done. Once the Hiryu is for all intents and purposes taken out of the war and four Japanese carriers are lost in a day, there's no recovering from that. And there's so many elements you don't think about. I had to, of course, for this delve into it. And they're all things that when they're pointed out to you, you go, oh yeah, sure, that would be a big deal, but they don't occur to you. I mean, people have been talking for years about all the pilots you lose and that's easy for most people to go, oh sure, the pilots would be a big deal. But this is the cutting edge of mid 20th century Naval technology and the engineers, the technicians, and all the specialists on these ships are, well, these are special people in their own right. And I don't think about this either. You think about an aircraft carrier as a weapon, but you forget that it's all of them working together that creates a weapon system. And this Kito Butai, this mobile strike force of the Japanese was a weapon system. And all these ships had people on board who knew the proper ways to work together. They acted as components. And once you took those people out, you just cannot, first of all, it's hard enough to replace individuals who go away, but you can't replace the institutional memory and everything involved. You can't recreate that without years of work. It took 14 years to build this thing. They lost it in a day, this mobile strike force. Britain's prime minister, Winston Churchill, whose forces are stretched all over the globe way too thinly and who's fighting major battles and dealing with problems in North Africa, supplying the Soviet Union. For them, trying to contend with these problems in the Far East has been a nightmare. And it's been at the very low end of their priority list simply because things are so grave in so many other places. And Churchill's response, he being a naval guy himself, by the way, to this American victory at Midway as written in his history of the Second World War, quote, This memorable American victory was of cardinal importance, not only to the United States, but to the whole allied cause. The moral effect was tremendous and instantaneous. At one stroke, the dominant position of Japan in the Pacific was reversed. The glaring ascendancy of the enemy, which had frustrated our combined endeavors throughout the Far East for six months, was gone forever. From this moment, all our thoughts turned with sober confidence to the offensive. No longer did we think in terms of where the enemy might strike the next blow, but where we could best strike at him to win back the vast territories that he had overrun in his headlong rush. The road would be long and hard, and massive preparations were still needed to win victory in the East. But the issue was not in doubt. Nor need the demands from the Pacific bear too heavily on the great effort the United States was preparing to exert in Europe. End quote. From a war perspective, an overall war perspective, the reason people care about this is it flips the initiative. It changes what the Japanese can do. The Second World War has a different feel, as I've said many times in the First World War, a different rhythm. Both of them involved grinding at a certain stage, grinding each other down. But in the First World War, either side could have taken out the other, till a very late time period. It was an undecided fight. The Second World War is much more one side has its way, and then there's a huge shift in momentum, and the other side has its way. And it's not so much grinding until about midway. And once the grinding part starts, that's when the fragility of things like the Axis economies and resource base and population size and industrial capability, that's when they're just exposed. Because that's what they don't have. The strong foundations. They've got a wonderful cutting edge. But once you dull that edge, and it becomes something where it is how much industrial power you have and all that stuff, then it becomes a rear guard action and a question of how long can the Axis side hold out. But holding out is not the same as losing. It depends on what your victory conditions are, doesn't it? It had always been part of the Japanese plan. If we recall, they were going to conquer these resources that they needed, then a bunch of territory to surround them as a defense perimeter, fortify it, link it with aircraft, and hold out for the inevitable Allied counterattack, right? And then the combination of things like interior lines of supply, the wicked terrain, the Japanese Yamato spirit, and the decadent weakness of the American Westerners would create a situation where they were paying such large numbers of lives that the people back home in the United States who could neither pronounce these places' names or find them on a map would eventually go, Why are we fighting over these places again? And Japan wins in a negotiated settlement, which after all is the way every one of Japan's conflicts and she so called opened up in the middle 19th century have gone. They have every reason to believe that's how this will end. After all, you know, the idea of unconditional surrender, which won't be announced until January 1943, by the way, that was not the normal way countries did things. So they had every reason to expect that some way or another, this is going to end with an agreement. And here's the thing, even if you start losing, if you're in a strong position, you have a lot to bargain with. I mean, look at the way it is in Europe. I mean, they're obviously fighting a war of annihilation with the Soviet Union, a giant racial thing. Hitler does not have a negotiated settlement in his plan B file, but Hitler doesn't necessarily have to be around. And there's a lot of people want to see Hitler gone. And if you ask Hitler, he'd say plots are ongoing all the time. So if all of a sudden the German leadership were replaced in 1942, something like that, 1943, they have so much territory conquered continental Europe. Basically, if this is a hundred years previously, we're not in a total war. That's a hell of a negotiating hand right there, right? You give some agent who negotiates for basketball players or NFL football players or big entertainers, that kind of leverage. Can you imagine? And I have this weird twisted brain for some reason that keeps playing a comedic, something like a bad Saturday Night Live vignette in my head, where I can't stop thinking about a TV stereotype of a sleazy kind of lounge lizard sports agent. The new representative of Germany after Hitler is being toppled, sliding into the Oval Office to give his initial pitch to President Roosevelt. And it's both comedic and instructive, though. I mean, you can imagine somebody walking in there going, Mr. President, big fan. Can I call you, Frank? Listen, Frank, I just want you to know, I have come from lunch with the new German leadership and all I have to say is, wow, where have those guys been all my life? I mean, they are big fans of yours, by the way, Frank, and they want you to know that they would have done this whole coup thing sooner if they could have. It's a difficult job to pull off, though, and it's not a free country, as you well know, Frank, but it could be a lot more free soon. These new leaders recognize things have gone way too far, they want to dial it all back, and they feel bad about the whole thing. They know they're going to have to make amends, and they are prepared to deal, and I have in my briefcase here, Frank, a deal to end all deals. I mean, this would make you the greatest peacemaker in the history of the planet, and all you have to do is sign it. I mean, we're talking about something where they are promising, get this, now hold on to your hats, promising to give up half of everything they've taken over the last several years. Half! This is going to save you a minimum, Frank, five years and 15 million lives. Think about the suffering that doesn't have to happen if you just sign this piece of paper here, and I've got to tell you, Frank, this looks like a war-winning deal to me. I mean, you can spin this any way you want to. I mean, this is victory, and you can walk away clean from this whole thing. I just want to warn you, as a patriotic American, they took me back to one of their secret factories, showed me some of these wonder weapons they have, and while I'm under a nondisclosure agreement, I just want to say, this thing's not in the bag, I'd sign this now and walk away a winner, Frank. And as funny as that sounds, ladies and gentlemen, can you imagine if the President of the United States or the leader of Great Britain were offered a deal out of the war that would save them years of fighting and tens of millions of lives? No matter what you think about unconditional surrender or the nastiness of the enemy or the state of things, it might be tough to sleep at night, don't you think, to turn a deal down like that? And if the worst happened years later and you somehow lost the war or it was a nightmarish, I mean, you might feel like that would have been something. The lesser of two evils, I don't know, kind of makes you never want to be in the position of one of these global world leaders, doesn't it? These are some tough choices to make. Of course, part of what makes it seem so hard to imagine is it sort of runs against the grain of what you might expect from human behavior, especially collective human behavior, doesn't it? If you're winning the war, if you're kicking butt, I mean, the tendency is to let it roll, isn't it? Not to sit there and go, all right, cashing my chips, I'm walking away. This is enough for me. I mean, you might decide that that's the plan before the war, but once it's going so well, I would think that there'd be an inertia that might be hard to struggle against, right? Until you get a few socks in the jaw and things start looking bad, it's hard to slow the train down when the conquests are ongoing. I have a book called Japanese Destroyer Captain, The Remembrances of Captain Tomichihara, and I believe we quoted him in a previous segment. And he talks about running into people after the war who were suggesting, hey, you know, it would have been good if we'd stopped right then. And he points out that that wasn't the attitude at the time, right? It's easy to think about that after the war, but people weren't thinking like that when the victories were rolling in. And he writes, quote, End quote.
SPEAKER_02: If you pull out a map from mid-1942 that shows the extent of the Japanese conquest in the Asia-Pacific theater, you are looking at the maximum extent of the blast zone from the Japanese supernova. That's as big as it gets. If you get out your ruler and you realize how many miles that is, it looks darn big enough, to be honest. This is their, as I believe we said, this could easily be seen as the defense perimeter they always wanted. Now, the allies do not have the luxury of assuming that this is all they want. The Japanese changed their codes after Midway, so for a while the allies are in a little bit more darkness than they're used to, and surprise again becomes something that's a realistic possibility. But the allies go from underestimating the Japanese capabilities before Pearl Harbor and the fall of Singapore and all that stuff, to almost the pendulum swinging the other way, where even things that are really, really improbable have to be taken as potential possibilities. Because, I mean, you know, who knows what they might do? The allies are worried about an invasion of Australia as a significant, maybe not short term, but not too far in the distant term, Japanese intention. And the navy thought about it, by the way, but they had to ask the army for permission, obviously, and the army all but laughed at them, maybe with a little bit of scorn. After all, they've been trying to eat the elephant that is China since like 1931. They keep a giant force available in northern Manchuria just in case the Soviet Union attacks them. Since December 7, 7 months ago, they've been fighting all the allies in places like Burma and the Philippines and all that. The last thing they want to do is send 10 or 11 or 12 divisions across thousands of miles of ocean to a brand new continent to open up a giant new front. Now, here's the thing, though. The allies do not have the luxury of assuming that this is the case and there are significant worries about an Australian invasion. They have to plan for it. The truth is, is if you look at the Japanese perimeter, though, at this point, they're still going to launch some offensives. The days of the offensives are not over, but their offensives are more like what the defensive side in the World War One battles would sometimes have to do. You might be on the defensive, but you might have to go on a limited offensive here or there, maybe straighten out the lines in this one part of the front or maybe capture this strong point to anchor another part of the front. And the place the Japanese are going to take to make a giant strong point in their defense perimeter is a place they've already tried to take and they'll take multiple shots at trying to take during the war. Port Moseby in New Guinea. What's more, the Solomon Islands, if you look at a map, are so close to New Guinea that really they kind of form one little theater there. They ping off each other. It's important to assume that both are involved in any planning or operations. If the Japanese get New Guinea, they're going to be able to threaten the supply lines of Australia. The reason why is for everything we've just learned in the war so far. The unbelievable power of aircraft against shipping. Now, people weren't stupid before the war. The Japanese defense plan before the conflict even started assumed that aircraft were going to play a big role in shutting down sea lanes, didn't it? But Coral Sea, Midway, everything so far has shown that the power of aircraft is far more intense than had been assumed. And all of a sudden, instead of needing a squadron of frigates like in the old days or a squadron of cruisers to shut down a key trade route or supply line or sea lane, you could do it with aircraft. You could put a few air bases around the perimeter of an entire island chain like the Solomons and shut the entire area down to shipping. So the Japanese having these places would be key towards being able to damage the Allies while having a huge strong point for yourself and protecting the edge of your defense perimeter down in that area. The Allies want it for the same reason. Go look at a map and you'll see that if the Allies have New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, it's going to be like a giant bulge in the Japanese defense perimeter, like somebody just stabbed them with a sword. This area is going to be like the black hole of the Pacific theater for a while, sucking in men playing ship supplies from both sides. On the American Allied side, this is going to be a fascinating time to look at all of the things that influence the way the Allies counter-attack here, which is what this is going to be, the first great Allied counter-attack in the Pacific. But it also involves the long-term strategy for how to win the war, and this is where you begin to see the human element come into play again in a way that's fascinating. If this were a war between Vulcans and all they cared about was efficiency and logic and all that kind of stuff, it would be fought very differently than the way it actually is fought, because in this war we have the opposite of logical Vulcans. We have some divas with egos. And it is worth pointing something out that a lot of people already understand. If you've watched anything, like if you're old enough to remember the Gulf War, for example, you get a chance to see how generals and people like that, military leaders, turn into movie stars, celebrities. They attain a visibility and cachet during wartime that you just don't see elsewhere. I mean, if you want to think, I remember reading a book once that compared Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, all those guys to like the gods of war in the Second World War pantheon, if you will. And below the gods of war, though, are these demigods, these people who, especially in their own theater and area of operations, are often almost gods themselves. I mean, I think of Douglas MacArthur as a guy who's on the borderline between demigod and god, and you can see some of those gods of war like Roosevelt actively thinking, what do I do if Douglas MacArthur comes up here and runs against me in the next election or something? He did call MacArthur one of the two most dangerous men in America, right? But it's not just MacArthur. Look at all the military stars you have that are involved in the war on both sides. You have your Rommel's, you know, you have your Patton's, I mean, all these people. MacArthur, as we said, probably the greatest of all, right? And we should recall that he was in the Philippines and the Philippines were going to fall and MacArthur said he was prepared to die there, said his wife and his little boy were both prepared to die there, and the president and the American military ordered him out. You know why? Well, I was reading one book the other day that said something I'd never thought about, and it was that they had this great fear that the Japanese would take MacArthur up on his offer, kill him, and then exhibit the photos of the mangled body of the almost godlike general and his wife and his little boy to the global media. That's going to be good. So they order him out. He goes to Australia, and of course, you know, don't call it a comeback, vows to return. In Australia, he has to try to figure out how you do that, right? What does return mean? How do you fight this war? And you know, if you gave a scenario list to a bunch of generals and admirals about a war, and then asked them how they would go about fighting it, I bet you're going to get a lot of different answers because there are a lot of different ways to fight a war, and it doesn't necessarily mean there's one right answer, right? A bunch of these people could be right. But if you have a bunch of your top military demigods telling you how to fight a war, and you're somebody like Franklin Roosevelt, what do you do if they differ? What if they have different ideas? We've made a lot of hay, haven't we, in this conversation so far about the Japanese governmental design and how their army and navy are sort of weird. They don't like each other. They sort of have to have these horse trading liaison sessions where they have to, you know, bargain to get anything done, ha ha ha. But we also said earlier, co-opting a phrase that I've used for many different great peoples, but the Japanese are like everyone else only more so, and you see the same dynamic in the United States military, just maybe not dialed up to the same degree. The guy who's running the United States Navy by this time, it's funny because if you wanted to have a well-oiled command structure and whatever, Franklin Roosevelt has the power to put anybody in here he wants to. He can say, you're not a team player, you're gone, right? If you're going to put MacArthur in control of this whole theater, you can have people that can work well with MacArthur. They just have to say yes or no, sir. And instead, the guy who's running the Navy is a guy who can't get along with people who are famously easy to get along with. Right? The guy's name, and he's famous, he's maybe the most powerful U.S. admiral that has ever been, it's Admiral Ernest King. A guy who's, the line about him that even the President of the United States used to tease him with to try to get a smile out of the guy was that he shaved with a blowtorch. I think it was his daughter that said that he was an even-keeled guy. He didn't have these emotional highs and lows, he was even-keeled. He woke up in a rage and he stayed that way. He was disliked by a lot of people. Author Robert Leckie in his book Challenge for the Pacific writes about Admiral Ernest King, quote, The admiral was tall, hard, and humorless. His face was of flint and his will was of adamant. In the United States Navy, which he commanded, it was sometimes said, he's so tough he shaves with a blowtorch. End quote. The author continues later, quote, If levity was rare in Admiral Ernest King, self-doubts or delusions were nonexistent. He was aware that he was respected rather than beloved by the Navy, and he knew that he was hated by roughly half the chiefs of the Anglo-American Alliance. Mr. Stimson, the U.S. Secretary of War, hated him. So did Winston Churchill, and Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, and Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham. End quote. Those are some of his British counterparts he had to work with. I was looking at the index in Eric Bergered's book Touched with Fire, and he has an Admiral King entry in his index, and in it is, it says, Admiral King, and then it says, Army hated by, and many pages, British hated by, and many pages. We just go, okay. In his fabulous book American Warlords, Jonathan W. Jordan writes about King, speaking by the way about General Marshall here, the head of the Army and the counterpart of Admiral King, quote, Marshall's staffers loathed the admiral. In his diary, Lieutenant General Joseph Stillwell called him a, quote, high-powered rejecter who won't cooperate or listen or help. End quote. He then says, Eisenhower grows to his diary, quote, one thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King. He is the antithesis of cooperation, a deliberately rude person, which means he's a mental bully. Of course, Stark, King's predecessor, Admiral Stark, of course Stark was just a nice old lady, but this fellow is going to cause a blow up sooner or later. I'll bet a cookie. End quote. It would be unfair to let Army people or foreigners have the last word on Admiral King's personality, but when you hear him quoted himself, he sounds like a guy who just doesn't have any time for people he considers inferior and he considers most people inferior. Jordan has him saying about General Marshall, who was a famous, I mean, work together guy. He's the glue, he's the oil that provides lubrication for all these divas to work together. And he said that George Marshall could be a very agreeable man when he wanted to be, but that he didn't always want to be. And then he's quoted as saying about George Marshall, quote, Sometimes I think he's stupid and other times very good. King later mused, quote, His basic trouble is that like all Army officers, he knows nothing about sea power and very little about air power. End quote. Jordan then writes, quote, King considered Marshall the second smartest man among the Joint Chiefs after himself, but that did not mean the two headstrong men would see eye to eye. Quote, We had many fights, he recalled sourly. End quote. But he liked the other generals even less and the Air Corps, which was part of the Army, the planes that flew at high altitude and bombed from high altitude were part of the Army at this point. And Hap Arnold was the guy who ran them. And Marshall in King's estimation was about the best the Army had. Arnold, the Air Corps commander, King claimed, didn't know what he was talking about. King told his biographer that to form a sound strategy, quote, You have to use imagination and horse sense. It always seemed to me that the Navy was better equipped with strategical insight than the Army. The Air Corps didn't know a damn thing about it. End quote. Admiral King reminds me of MacArthur in a way. MacArthur's a hard to deal with guy. King is a hard to deal with guy. You think, why are they putting up with these hard to deal with people? Well, they're bringing something to the table, right? We have to assume that there's some real positives that make the not able to work with side of these people something you can deal with, something you'll put up with, right? You'll tolerate it because of what they bring to the table. And King is a fascinating character, first of all, to be the way he is in sort of his job versus the way he is outside his job. I mean, he was a drinker, a womanizer. He was the first one at the officers club with something in his hand. I mean, he's this interesting character, right? You didn't want to sit next to him because he would reach, you know, under the table at women. I mean, he's a party dude sometimes. And then other times on his job, he's like the floor manager at the restaurant. The boss hires because the whole staff is kind of slacking off a little, getting a little lazy. So he hires just some jerk who is on you for everything. I'm paraphrasing here, but King said something like, you know, no matter how good they are, meaning the sailors or the officers, you know, you need a good kick in the ass every six weeks or you get lazy, right? So that guy who's the jerk floor manager that's just making your life miserable, though, sometimes they do actually do what they were hired to do. And everybody gets a little bit more tense and nervous and on on job and an alert and worried about the little things. Remember, in mid 1942, the US Navy is still learning how to be a wartime Navy and has only been one for about six or seven months. It's shaping up and guys like Ernest King are part of the shaping up process because he's good at that. And he's not going to be necessarily nice or liked for doing it. He's also we should point out and this is important to Franklin Roosevelt, apparently, too. He is a brawler. He is a fighter. He is aggressive. I'm not being a Homer here when I say that both the US Army and US Navy, I even grading on a non current mean they are aggressive. That is part of their doctrine for good or ill. Right. And that works both ways on you sometimes. But in I mean, the Navy is aggressive and King is an aggressive admiral. And now he's in charge of things. And his problem and MacArthur's problems, besides their personal things, are now going to stem also from the services and the branches of the military, you know, which they're a part of. As we've said before, at length, the Japanese Army and Navy don't much like each other and find it difficult sometimes to work together. The same is true for the American military. These days, what passes for interservice rivalry is when the ribbing gets a little bit too mean after a very one sided Army Navy football game. But it used to be really severe. It's gone up and down like a forest fire, you know, sometimes getting really hot and sometimes getting really low. Before the Second World War, these guys didn't like each other at all often. And it's funny because it's at every level. It's at the level where, you know, the 20 year old, private first class guys and the sailors and the marine recruits are at the bar drinking or whatever. And somebody mouths off and everybody's had a few too many and they get into a brawl. That's the kind of thing you imagine that older guys tell stories about when they're in their 50s and 60s reminiscing on their wild youth. The problem is, is that they don't seem to outgrow that and they feel the same way. And it colors their ability to work with their counterparts in the other services. Here's the way E.N.W. Till writes about the interservice rivalry in the United States after saying that it colors the entire way, the entire strategy, especially early in the war. There's a dimension of interservice rivalry and rancor in this, he says, in all of it. So if it had been fought by Vulcans, you wouldn't have this. But because it wasn't, you do. And the war is fought differently because of it. And in the conquering tide, E.N.W. Till writes about the interservice rivalry, quote, And clean bunks, amenities that seemed criminally lavish when compared to the squalor and privations of war on land, end quote. He then goes on to point out that the rivalry and animosity between the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Navy, right, you think of services that are really supposed to get along and work well together, dates back to the Revolutionary War and was notorious, pointing out, quote, End quote. So the Army and the Navy don't like each other? The Navy and the Marines have their issues? And of course, just to be fair, the Army and the Marines have their issues, Toll continues, quote, Senior Army officers regarded the entire Marine Corps as a plot hatched by the Navy to usurp their rightful function and did their best to asphyxiate it or at least limit its deployments to units no larger than a regiment, end quote. Now it gets even better. There is no U.S. Air Force at this time. There is, however, an Army Air Corps and Navy flyers, and they don't care for each other, quote, Naval aviators grumbled that the Army Air Forces handed out medals like after dinner mints. Pilots of different services took satisfaction in buzzing a rival's airfield and aircraft or, when on the ground, holding down their brakes while gunning their engines in order to blow clouds of dirt and dust onto their adversaries. Every major action early in the Pacific War, he writes, involved a dimension of interservice rancor, end quote. When you have Douglas the Situation MacArthur in Australia, an admiral earnest king running the United States Navy, I've heard it said that he's the most powerful admiral that has ever run the United States Navy, you're going to have some sparks over, you know, questions of things like strategy. MacArthur has a plan, and while the carriers are still smoking after Midway, he cables it to Washington, D.C. In typical MacArthur fashion, he's got his eyes on the prize. He's seeing the whole war laid out in front of him like a vista, the surrender of Japan and everything. First step's going to be the taking of New Britain's famous harbor and airfields at Rabaul, which is part of the early stuff that happened in 1942. And he's going to do it in like three weeks, he says, which is insane. But that's the plan. And the way he's got the plan set up, this should surprise nobody, would set it up so that the Army's taking the lead, which of course means MacArthur would be running it and the Navy would be in a subsidiary role. But of course, you know, conditions here in the Pacific with all the islands and water being what they are, MacArthur told Washington that he would need a division of troops trained in amphibious warfare, that's a way of saying Marines, and two aircraft carriers at a time when the United States only has three in the Pacific. And as we all know, within hours, I think, of the Battle of Midway, about a month after the Battle of the Coral Sea, when the admirals of the United States Navy are probably still in shock by how quickly you can go from having a nice set of carriers to having no carriers, right, a knife edge of like 15 minutes. The idea of handing over those carriers to a guy like Douglas MacArthur, to whom they will be just one of the spinning plates or juggling balls that he's managing to keep in his mind as he, you know, sees his eyes on the prize of the eventual defeat of Japan and the return to the Philippines, don't call it a comeback. Well, to them that looks like handing a precious glass family heirloom over to the klutzy forgetful child or the ring of power golems precious over to somebody that if he somehow were to lose the ring of power, his idea of what you do in that situation is ask the Navy for another one. And by the way, Ernest King had already had a plan for this region that he'd been telling the president about for months. And his plan, this should shock nobody, was designed in a way that would mean the Navy was running it. And people like MacArthur and his army forces would be there to mop up and garrison things as the Marines and the Navy continue to jump forward, seeing the entire Pacific theater as their theater, as Admiral King pointed out over and over again, we know we gave you the Atlantic, right, you've got the European theater, you go have your army fun over there. This is a Navy operation. King is especially concerned with a Japanese airfield for seaplanes that has been built on the island of Tulagi and he wants to go take that back right away ASAP. And his problem is the army is arguing with him over whether or not this is his decision to make and whether he would control it, even if he did that. This is the way in his book Guadalcanal, author Richard B. Frank describes the intensifying problems and we should point out there is a Joint Chiefs of Staff with all of the heads of the military who are supposed to work together for the president just like there is now in the US military chain of command. But in mid 1942, this entity had only existed for a matter of months and was very loosey goosey and amorphous. At one point I was reading Franklin Roosevelt was asked by the press a question about it and he just sort of shook his shoulders and said he hadn't the foggiest idea, right? They're working it out. And when you see the actual histories, it really appears like it's much more of a question of two men hashing it out, the head of the army, George Marshall, and the head of the Navy, Ernest King. And one of them has their subsidiary entity in that location, right? In that zone of control, in that theater. For King and the Navy, it's Admiral Nimitz. For Marshall and the army, it's our friend Douglas MacArthur. And in the book Guadalcanal, author Richard Frank writes, quote, On June 26th, Marshall presented the case for endowing command of the offensive in MacArthur. Acknowledging that simple lines drawn on the map earlier that year were not absolutely controlling, Marshall argued that MacArthur's position and knowledge would enable him best to coordinate allied efforts. King replied in writing the same day. He began by pointing out that in Europe, where the major forces engaged would be ground troops, King had acceded to army command. In phrases, Frank writes, that became progressively less tactful, King stated that naval and amphibious forces predominated in the Pacific and command should therefore be Navy. In fact, he asserted the operation, quote, could not be conducted any other way. End quote, Frank continues. In a further slap at the army and MacArthur, King promised to proceed, quote, even if no support of the army forces in the Southwest Pacific is made available. End quote. Underlining this threat, Frank writes, King directed Nimitz on June 27th to prepare for operations on the premise that only Navy and Marine units would be available. Marshall restrained himself from a reply in kind to this provocative missive, not so MacArthur, who threw one of his more remarkable tantrums of the war. End quote.
SPEAKER_03: I remember reading one description of MacArthur that said at times he could be positively Shakespearean. This is the way Ronald H. Specter in Eagle Against the Sun describes this moment of disagreement between the two divas.
SPEAKER_02: Quote, the argument over command rocked the Joint Chiefs of Staff for almost a week. At one point, King warned Marshall that he would direct Nimitz to go ahead with the operation. Quote, even if no support of army forces in the Southwest Pacific is made available. End quote. While MacArthur, Specter writes, declared that the Navy's obstinacy was part of a long time plot to bring about, quote, this is MacArthur talking, the complete absorption of the national defense function by the Navy, the Army being relegated to merely base training, garrison and supply purposes. End quote. He claims to have been party to information back in the Hoover administration that he gleaned info, secret info on the fact that there was this plot to usurp the Army and that this is part of another brick in the Intolerable Wall. It's a little kooky at this level, isn't it? And yet you see it in so many militaries. Looks like the Japanese, kind of, but other militaries do this too. The solution turns out to be the same sort of thing you see in these other militaries. The same kind of liaisons and haggling you see from the Japanese trying to keep their army and navy in sync. You see on the American side now. George Marshall, ever the mensch, comes up with a plan that gives both his little starlets, their song in the musical and an equal number of lines. Everybody gets a piece of the action, a moment in the sun, in a multi-phased plan that puts each side in charge, you know, separately. Like first we're going to have a first stage and that'll be a navy stage and then they get to run that. Then there'll be a second stage, this'll be an army stage and then MacArthur and the army get to run that. And you all play nicely together when it's not your turn. The first stage is going to involve that operation that Admiral King wants to do and wants to do ASAP. He's going to send landing forces and naval assets to take over islands in the Solomons. Tulagi had always been on the list, but in July, early July, the Japanese land on the island of Guadalcanal right by Tulagi and start building an air base there. And this takes an already impatient Admiral King, worried about his golden opportunity here after midway closing, and lights a fire under the rear end of a person who needs no fire lit under his rear end. And he begins pushing everyone else. We have to invade now, now, now. He wants to invade the Solomon Islands in like three weeks.
SPEAKER_02: And everybody's jaws just drop. Here's the way naval historian Craig L. Simons in his book World War II at Sea puts it and it picks up right after the MacArthur King, you know, crisis in command. He writes, quote, having won the administrative battle for now, King announced an accelerated timetable for the operation. This is the Solomon Islands operation, the Guadalcanal one. Once the Japanese airfield on Guadalcanal became operational, it would give the mayor superiority over the invasion beaches. To ensure that did not happen, King set a target of August 1st, 1942, only three weeks away for the invasion. It was stunningly ambitious and in the eyes of many, unrealistic. All the components of a complex amphibious assault, a landing force, the ships to carry them, other ships to escort them, plus the fuel, supplies, and the ammunition to sustain them, had to be found, gathered, organized, and delivered in a shockingly short time. This, he writes, would be daunting under any circumstances, but especially so in mid 1942 due to the acute shortage of transports. Though the assault was endowed with the code name Operation Watchtower, colloquially it came to be called Operation Shoestring. End quote. This is an understandable, though, military trade-off that is encountered all the time, and there's no always right answer. It kind of depends on conditions, and reasonable and even unreasonable military minds can differ. This is a question of do we attack now before we're ready, maybe even in a half-assed way, but catch the enemy off guard? The Japanese were not expecting any counterattack until at least January 1943. That's six months from now, so you would catch the enemy off guard. Or do you wait and delay this several months, get your ducks in a row, rehearse this thing, stockpile supplies, get all the different commanders on the same page with the same plan, have zero hour coordinated at just the right time, and go like it's June 6, 1944, and you're landing on the beaches at Normandy? That does sound organized, doesn't it? The problem is the delay gives your enemy time to organize as well. And the likelihood is that by then they'll have operational airfields all in that area, potentially hundreds of warplanes in the sky looking to sink your carriers and your transport ships. It's a trade-off. But if I tell you something's going to involve trade-offs, the smart thing to do is then to ask some follow-up questions, isn't it? What sort of trade-offs are we talking about here? What sort of disadvantages are my men, if I'm the Marine Corps commander, going to have to face as part of these trade-offs? When the Marines go into the South Solomon Islands, they don't even have any good maps. There's a few little aerial photos of little pieces of the field, but I mean, they interviewed people who lived there a decade ago and said, now, can you tell us a little bit about the layout of the land from memory? And there are many famous stories. One of my favorites involves the so-called grassy knoll or the hill off the beach, because that's what they've been told. Well, there's a slight hill right off the beach, and then when the Marines land, eventually they look and they see what appears to be an extinct volcano in the distance, right? It doesn't match the maps they had at all. I can't imagine any U.S. forces of any size at all going anywhere in the world today without tons of photos and satellite images and maps of all kinds. Imagine going in there blind. That's a hell of a trade-off if you're a Marine. They are an interesting breed, though. I should just say that growing up, and I've said this many times I feel like in this program, but this show is one where I grew up in the fumes of this era, and the era was so powerful that the fumes were too, and there was a romancing quality to the Marines when I was growing up still. It was a very John Wayne, I mean, when you saw it portrayed in the movies, the Marines had a certain swagger and cachet, and as Army guys never tired of saying the best PR management firm in the American military, Army guys are quoted as saying that they could be involved in heavy-duty combat somewhere and that newspapers never noticed, but the Marines get on a boat to go from one place to another, and the media is all, I mean, they were media darlings. And we should point out, and we will many times in the future, that the Army will actually carry the lion's share of the weight of fighting in this theater eventually, but it's generally the Marines who land on the beaches, not always, but generally. And Guadalcanal is the first time they do it with the subsidiary islands of places like Tulagi, then there's another one called Gavutu, another one called Tanimbogo, I believe, and they're all part of this little teeny island chain with Guadalcanal being the big one in that little group. Guadalcanal, by the way, about 85 miles long, about 30 miles wide. My stepfather and my father both served in the Navy. My stepfather was there at the end of the Second World War. He didn't see combat, but he was sure he was going to. We've talked about that story many times. So we were basically a Navy family. My dad's brother was in the Navy in the Second World War. My uncle Kim was in the Marine Corps aviators. He was a Marine Corps pilot. So he didn't have to go doing any of those horrible things that my stepfather and father continually warned me about. They used different terms. My dad was a lot more cool about it, just vague about it, but my stepfather said, don't ever find yourself in the Marines. He said, they're crazy. It's a suicide squad, he said. And remember, the Navy guys are the ones who had to take the Marines to the dumping off point on the island and let them off and then hightail it back to the ships while the Marines have to keep going into the teeth of the defenses, right? And my stepfather said, don't ever find yourself in the Marines. You'll be dropped off a half mile from the shore, hip deep in water, you know, on a coral reef and have to wade in under machine gunfire. He said, don't ever get in a situation where you put yourself into that. You're too smart for that, which is a very Navy thing to say, isn't it? Look at what Admiral King says about all the other services. I've met tons of smart Marines though, over my lifetime. And my uncle Kim was brilliant when worked for McDonnell Douglas after his time out of the service. I mean, I think it's just a difference of opinion. And my stepfather's attitude is, you know, we want you coming home after a war. And if you're a Marine, your chances of that are lower because they're going to be right there in the middle of it. Some people join up for precisely that reason, though. They're a really interesting breed though, much romanticized when I was a kid, of course, but some of this based on, you know, some truth. I really liked the way author Richard B. Frank describes the Marines and this mix that you get during this period between the old timers who were there, you know, long before this war was on the horizon to the newbies, the guys who joined up, you know, when they were in the Navy. And the big buildup began before Pearl Harbor. And then this huge glut of people that come after Pearl Harbor. These guys, you know, leave the basic training early sometimes because they're so needed. And these are people who were told, you know, join us if you want to be the first in line to actually come to grips in combat with the Japanese. And these are the people who said, Yeah, sign me up for that. That sounds good. I don't want to wait around cooling my heels. I want to get to them right away. I'm mad about Pearl Harbor. And then they join up with these people who are the opposite sometimes of these green, young go getters. Let's go get those. They're much more like the cynical old timers who are just deadly. And Frank describes them this way. Oh, and by the way, when he says this other group, he's talking about the old timers who were there already versus the newcomers who are just arriving, the volunteers who are called up and are gung ho. And Frank writes, quote, The other group was, by contrast, small in number, but like a drop of dye in a gallon of water, they gave the whole division an unmistakable hue, and they stamped a nickname on the division, the old breed. One of their own officers, Lieutenant Colonel Samuel B. Griffith, colorfully described them. Quote, First Sergeants yanked off planks in Navy yards, Sergeants from recruiting duty, gunnery Sergeants who had fought in France, perennial privates with disciplinary records a yard long. These were the professionals, the old breed of the United States Marines. Many had fought cacos in Haiti, bandidos in Nicaragua, and French, English, Italian and American soldiers and sailors in every bar in Shanghai, Manila, Tsingtao, Tientsin, and Peking. They were inveterate gamblers, he writes, and accomplished scroungers who drank hair tonic in preference to post exchange beer, which he says they called horse piss, cursed with a wonderful fluency and never went to chapel. He says they call that the God box, unless forced to. Many dipped snuff, smoked rank cigars, or chewed tobacco, cigarettes were for women and children. They had little use for libraries or organized athletics. They could live on jerked goat and the strong blacked coffee they called boiler compound, and hash cooked in a tin hat. Many wore expert badges, with bars for proficiency, in rifle, pistol, machine gun, hand grenade, auto rifle, mortar, and bayonet. They knew their weapons and they knew their tactics. They knew they were tough, and they knew they were good. There were enough of them to leaven the division, and to impart to the thousands of younger men a share of both the unique spirit which animated them, and the skills they possessed. When Marine Corps General Vandergrift, 55 years old at this time, and the guy who knows he's going to be commanding Marines in combat at some point, finds out that that at some point is in August 1942, he says he just couldn't believe it. He'd been told by Admiral King himself that his Marines would not be seeing combat till at least January 1943, which coincidentally is the same intelligence that the Japanese had. Instead, on August 1st is the due date. People just tell King it's impossible, we can't do it. He begrudgingly gives them another week. So the new due date is August 7th, 1942. There is a hastily thrown together rehearsal near Fiji that does not go well, and leads to a sense of foreboding about what's about to happen here in this disorganized mess. The first, or better described as the largest, amphibious assault since the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915, and people will recall that didn't go exactly swimmingly by the end. On July 27th, only 11 days before the Marines are scheduled to hit the beach, a rather extraordinary meeting occurs on the USS Saratoga, the aircraft carrier. It's the only get-together between the commanders on the scene here that's going to happen before the attack, the guy who is the operational head of the whole thing, Admiral Gormley, doesn't even attend, he sends somebody else. Admiral Fletcher will be there though, Admiral Turner will be there, and Marine Corps General Vandegrift will be there. The reason it's extraordinary, first of all people took notes, is the animosity between Fletcher and the other two men. Fletcher, as you recall, he's been at sea most of this year, he's fought in both Coral Sea and Midway, and those were recent. This is the way author Robert Leckie in Challenge for the Pacific describes it. He says, quote, Archer Vandegrift, the general, who had once been startled to see the unruffled Admiral Gormley acting like a drill sergeant, was now amazed to see that Fletcher looked tired and nervous, and he put it down to the admiral's recent battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. Next he was surprised to learn that Fletcher had neither knowledge of, nor interest in the Guadalcanal operation. Finally, he was thunderstruck to hear him saying frankly that he would not succeed. Then, Admiral Fletcher turned on Admiral Turner, and angrily accused him of quote, Unimpressed by Turner's indignant denial, Fletcher interrupted him to ask, Five, Turner replied. Fletcher shook his head stubbornly. Two days, he said, were quite enough. He would not risk his carriers any longer. End quote. It's worse than that on a personal level though, Fletcher basically says to Turner that he doesn't have any combat experience and he's making all these plans from Washington, D.C. Doesn't have any idea about this revolution in military affairs that Admiral Fletcher has seen up close and personal and recently. Not going to let this other desk-bound admiral, a planner, not going to let him use the precious aircraft carriers as part of his learning curve. And Vandegrift is stunned because he'll leave this meeting described as furious, trying to explain to Admiral Fletcher that the 17,000 marines he's going to land within 24 hours of the initial assault need air cover. And his plan is to capture the airfield that's on the island, unfinished of course, and finish it. And then have his own aircraft and then the carriers can leave. Turner doesn't even have that kind of optimism. Admiral Turner just wants the aircraft carriers to stick around long enough for him to unload his transports. But if his transports are going to take four days and Fletcher only promises two, well what do the other two days look like? Fletcher will eventually compromise and give him three. So if you are the dad of one of these marines who's going to land on this island 11 days from now, you just had a bad dress rehearsal over near the Fiji Islands and now you have this? Doesn't look too good, does it? On April 7, 1942, the marines hit the beach in the South Solomon Islands. The island of Guadalcanal, which is like 85, 90 miles long, something like that, about 30 miles wide. And the subsidiary smaller islands, places like Tulagi and I think it's Kavatu and a bunch of little ones. The really little ones are measured in yards by yards. Tulagi is like three and a half miles by a half mile. The marines land on all these different islands. They have a big bombardment by the fleet first and this is going to become the standard script for the rest of the Pacific Wars island campaigns. It will evolve, it will change, it will become more efficient, they will learn a lot of lessons, but the basic template and sort of style stays the same. You have the offshore ships shooting first at the beachhead, then you bring in the planes, which they duly do, who strafe and bomb the beach and drop colored smoke any place they think warrants a little extra attention still from the guns offshore. And then the transports come in, the precious transports, there's never enough of them for any power, any country, the precious transports come in and drop the marines off on the beach. The assumption is the marines are going to lose a lot of people in this first assault. They fully expect the D-Day, June 6, 1944 treatment. They expect to run into machine gun nests and artillery, certainly mortar rounds dropping on the beach, it might be mined, you would expect barbed wire, maybe tank trap type stuff. They're expecting the worst. And instead they're stunned when they roll up on this place and in a twilight zone level of eeriness there doesn't seem to be any enemy there. The marines thought there might be as many as 5,000 Japanese combat troops on this island. And there still might be! One of the nasty things about these islands, which look like you're fighting at a resort in the tropics when you're looking at it from the air from like 5 miles away, right? Gorgeous green jungle canopy, the water is an unbelievable blue. But when you get down to ground level you realize the only thing you can see is the beach and the ocean you just came over, the little strip of land between the water, you know, covered with sand, and where the jungle begins. And then, well, who knows, it's a giant haunted house as far as the marines are concerned. And there will be this juxtapositioning of the marines opening coconuts on the beach, obviously this sense of relief that they weren't just machine gunned to death trying to take this landing beach. But also the officers will come ashore and see that the marines are not too keen on exploring any farther because they think this must be a trap. They're just waiting for them to do something so let's just stay here. There's a giant traffic jam trying to unload all the supplies, it's as disorder and chaos filled as everybody predicted. There will be all kinds of famous stories about how bad it was, I mean marines would talk about how the transports were loaded in backwards sometimes, and the important stuff you need right now, like ammunition and explosives was loaded first, and then a whole bunch of non-essentials was loaded after that so they're throwing stuff into the ocean to get to the stuff at the very back of the hole that they need right now. The situation will not be so easy on the subsidiary islands. Tulagi is about 20 miles off of Guadalcanal. On that island and the smaller ones the marines run into Japanese. On Tulagi a couple of what are called marine raider battalions land on the tiny little island and begin fanning out. Here's the way author Robert Leckie in Challenge for the Pacific describes it. Throughout the morning the raiders moved over rough jumbled ground, working through rocks and trees, keeping clear of the shore trails covered by enemy cliffs. At noon they spilled into the former Chinese settlement on the island's north coast, and there the Japanese struck back. Mortar shells began to fall, marines toppled. Lieutenant Samuel Miles, a physician, rushed to help three badly wounded men and fell dead, the first casualty of the campaign. A company commander was wounded, the marines moved more warily against these rickety Chinese shacks, and the tempo of their advance slowed. End quote.
SPEAKER_02: They also got a lesson in how good the Japanese are at digging in. They had taken these dugouts and dug them into the sides of hillsides, crisscrossing little teeny depressions and what would be very very very small like valleys with machine gun fire. And by the time the marines figure out how they might handle this, the sun's going down. And they are going to have to fight at night. And as we said earlier, the Japanese kind of pride themselves on and look for a psychological advantage with their night fighting. They do it very well at sea and they do it very well at land.
SPEAKER_02: And the guy who's in charge of the Raider Battalion here, his nickname is Red Mike because he's a redhead, a ginger as you Brits would say. Red Mike Edson, Lieutenant Colonel, he knows a counterattack is coming at night and it does. The Japanese come out, they try to infiltrate it. It's a very prolonged night sort of assault that is terrifying on a number of different levels for the marines. One of these levels is the willingness of the Japanese to fight long beyond any hope is left, just to take some more marines with them. There is a war correspondent who lands with the marines on Guadalcanal and will be there for a while. His name is Richard Tragascas. He writes a book, wrote a book called Guadalcanal Diary. And he published these writings where the American people back home, you know obviously with war censorship taking out stuff that the government doesn't want. But this is how everyone's going to find out what it's like to fight the Japanese through people like Tragascas. And Tragascas is not on to loggy when this fighting happens. But he arrives soon afterwards and he talks to Lieutenant Colonel Red Mike Edson about what it was like to fight the Japanese. And Edson, you know again, if you know anything about the Pacific War you're jaded by Japanese conduct. You kind of know, I mean they're famous right? They'll fight to the last mile. But this was not something at the time that, there were rumors, but Mike Edson explains that that's just what they did. And Tragascas quotes this lieutenant colonel and these numbers are numbers from the scene at the time. So they may be different now that the history books have checked and gotten records. But this is what the marine lieutenant colonel on Sulag at the time thought. And pardon the language as we said earlier, this is the zeitgeist of the times. We're in a giant race war here on all sides and in all theaters. To take this out would be somehow dishonest. This is what Tragascas writes. Edson continues a minute later. Quote. End quote. He talks about the counter attack at night saying we suffered quite a few casualties.
SPEAKER_02: But then analyzing for the war correspondent right afterwards this is how he described the Japanese way of fighting. And we should point out there's an old line that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. But the Japanese do in this war. Because the Americans and the Australians have both fought the Japanese already right? And they fought the Japanese in the war. And they fought the Japanese in the war. And they fought the Japanese in the war. And they fought the Japanese in the war. And they fought the Japanese in the war. And they fought the Japanese in the war. And they fought the Japanese in the war. And they fought the Japanese in the war. And they fought the Japanese in the war. And they fought the Japanese in the war. And they fought the Japanese in the war. And they fought the Japanese in the war. And they fought the Japanese in the war. And that's what the Japanese are going to be like. And we're jaded because we know that they're willing to commit suicide and all those things. These people at the time had heard about this. But it's one thing to read what you think might be, you know, war time propaganda exaggeration. And another thing to see it up close. Red Mike says, quote, The Japanese defense was apparently built around small groups in dugouts with no hope of escape. They would stay in there as long as there was one live Jap. There was a radio for communication in nearly every one of these holes. We pulled out 35 dead Japs from one dugout. In another we took out 30. Some of these people had been dead for three days. But others were still in there shooting. In none of these places was there any water or food. They had evidently made a dash for their dugouts when the naval bombardment came. Without stopping for provisions. In one case, he says, there were three Japs cornered. They had one pistol. They fired the pistol until they had three shots left. Then one Jap shot the two others and killed himself. End quote. That's not only shocking for anyone, but it is something that foreshadows how tough this is all going to be. And if we recall that this is an element that's baked into the Japanese grand strategy here. This idea that they're willing, it's like a giant game of chicken, they're willing to suffer heavier casualties than the other side is for a bunch of places that are more important to the Japanese than they are to the allies. This is not American boys dying for some major super cause like, you know, that you can easily rationalize. Like landing on the beaches of Normandy. Or a Russian son dying to protect Moscow. Or an allied soldier, you know, dying in the attempt to take Berlin and end the European war. These are Americans dying for little islands nobody's ever heard of. Tulagi, as I believe we may have said, three and a half miles long and a half mile wide. The American combat casualties for taking that tiny little place and a couple of other little islands that are measured in yards by yards. Well, I've seen different numbers. According to the US West Point Atlas, World War II in the Pacific, 144 Americans lose their lives taking these places in like 24 hours. 144 dead is about the same number of dead due to enemy action that the entire coalition side suffered in the first Gulf War. The Japanese, by the way, lose between eight and nine hundred men for these tiny little islands. That's quite a game of geopolitical chicken right there, isn't it? And the numbers always look small in the Pacific when you compare them to the Eastern Front. Or places like Italy in 43 or Western Europe in 1944. But if we divide this by, you know, deaths per yard, then the real cost becomes manifest. And you start to realize that these people are losing lives at an enormous clip for the size of the places they're taking. And we have a lot of these places still left to take. And the Japanese grand strategy assumes that because of their willingness to fanatically defend these places and take as many of the enemy with them over and over and over again. Eventually people will get tired of losing their sons for places that seem insignificant to them. As you might imagine, once the Japanese hear about this landing on these islands in the South Solomons, they respond. They have that base we told you about, about 650 miles to the north. Rabaul, air, naval assets, they send them both down to the area. The ships take a little bit longer. The planes arrive within a few hours and begin to go after the transports. And there are battles between the anti-aircraft on the transport ships and the Japanese aircraft. There are battles between American fighters off those carriers of Admiral Fletcher's and the Japanese planes. Both sides take their losses. But the carrier strength is getting slowly whittled down. And Admiral Fletcher thinks he's low on fuel, apparently. And so when a message comes from Admiral Turner saying, all troops ashore, on the 8th of August, Fletcher decides, well, I've done my job. Apparently, this is all controversial. Fletcher asks for permission from that admiral who's nowhere nearby, Gormley, to leave. About nine hours later, he gets the word, OK, you can go. And he decides to take off. The problem, of course, is that Admiral Turner might have had all his troops ashore, but he didn't have all their stuff ashore. So who's going to protect him with the aircraft carriers gone? Historian Craig L. Simons in World War II at Sea describes Turner's reaction this way, quote, When Turner received his copy of Fletcher's request to withdraw, he was furious. He later characterized Fletcher's departure as nothing less than desertion. And he used even harsher words in private, end quote. Before those carriers even get the approval to leave, though, the Japanese ships come to respond to this invasion and they get there at night. And the Japanese are wonderful night fighters. They've put a lot of effort and training and they have a lot of pride. And surprise attacks by their Navy has been a source of pride for them since at least the turn of the century. Japanese Rear Admiral Gunichi Mikawa is in charge of some cruisers that slip down into what's known as the slot. It's an area between all these islands that forms a natural channel. And at night they slide in and they run in on purpose to the American cruisers protecting the whole beachhead. The first sign that anything is amiss is a message from a U.S. destroyer. I love it because it sounds like they've spotted aliens or sharks in the water. At about 1.45 a.m. in the very dark Pacific waters between Guadalcanal and Savo Island, the bridge, the officers on the U.S. cruise or the Chicago get a message from the U.S. destroyer Patterson. Warning! Warning! Strange ships entering harbor! Simon says that the only real indication that the admirals on these ships have that there's something amiss is when large caliber shells begin throwing up huge geysers around their ships. The Japanese launch their famous long lance torpedoes even before the guns open fire. So as soon as the American and Australian cruisers in this situation find out they're under attack, there are torpedoes on the way, shells landing, spotlights illuminating the ships, and mass confusion. As you well know, if you're on the receiving end of a spotlight, your view is very different than if you're on the projecting end. A torpedo blows off the bow of the Chicago before they even figure out really what's going on. They haven't even apparently had time to tell the other ships what's happening, so as Simon points out, they all get to be surprised in turn. The Australian cruiser Canberra takes 24 shell hits, he says, in less than four minutes, making it a burning and sinking wreck, and then says, quote, Arriving amidst the northern group of cruisers, Macawa lit up his searchlight and used it as a pointer. Like a bright white finger in the night, it illuminated one American ship after another, as if to say, here, fire on this ship. The cruiser Astoria was the first victim. An early salvo started a fire in her airplane hangar, and the bright flames in the dark night provided the Japanese with a vivid target. Pounded by successive hits from eight inch shells, she lost power and was dead in the water. Captain Samuel Moore's Quincy was next. Caught in a deadly crossfire, the Quincy was shot to pieces before her main battery guns could be trained on the foe. Moore himself was an early victim when a shell hit the bridge, leaving it, quote, a shambles of dead bodies, end quote. Simons continues, quote, In his last order, the mortally wounded Moore told the helmsman to try to ground the crippled vessel on Savo Island to prevent her from sinking. That gambit failed, and when a torpedo hit the Quincy's magazine, in the words of one survivor, she literally leaped out of the ocean. She sank at 2.35. End quote. In a little over two hours, in a night attack that was chaotic, well, at least for the people on the receiving end of it, the Americans and Australians lose four cruisers and over a thousand lives. The Japanese losses are negligible. This is considered to be by many the worst defeat in the history of the United States Navy in a fair fight. And it makes it very clear to Admiral Turner with his transports and cargo ships still unloading at Guadalcanal and Tulagi and all that, that he's in great danger. He just lost his aircraft covering force, and now he just lost his heavy cruiser covering force, so he leaves too. With ships that still have cargo on them that the Marines need, and leaves 11,000 or so Marines on Guadalcanal itself, but all in all in this area with Tulagi and these other, it's about 17,000 guys who are now marooned here in the South Solomon Islands. With a counterattack on the way. By the time the elements of the counterattack arrive, the Marines have been able to prepare a little bit. They create a defense perimeter around this airfield that'll be called Henderson Field and that they will finish just in time and get some aircraft on it just in time for the counterattack. They will create this zone around the airfield that will become the closest thing that Guadalcanal has to anything you might call a front line in this island war. This will be the area that's fought over. They will have just enough time apparently to string a single strand, and these silly little things sometimes become important, a barbed wire in front of some of their positions, about 30 yards in front of some of their positions. So that when on August 21st after midnight the first of these Japanese counterattacks arrive, it is a slaughter. The Japanese had landed the first troops for a counterattack after midnight on August 19th, and instead of waiting for reinforcements as had been the plan, the commander has a bad case of what the Japanese called victory disease, or maybe he's just really confident, and he moves right toward the Marine positions instead. The elite Achiiki detachment, 900 men originally, I think 100 were left behind to guard the rear area or whatnot, but these 800 men who show up, who attacked thinking that they were facing a smaller force probably, I mean the very fact that the Marines were marooned may have misled the Japanese intelligence people who were looking at the reconnaissance and thinking, well if this was a large number of Marines, surely they would have transferred. Surely they would have transport ships and people resupplying them, I mean it might have confused them. In this battle you get to see a lot more of the hallmarks of these Japanese opponents though, because when you fight them half the time or more it looks like you're in the Vietnam War and you can hardly see anything, and it's this jungle war where everything's invisible and you almost never see the enemy. But what you didn't have in that war that you have in the second world war against the Japanese is sometimes they just launch full frontal attacks in bunched up groups, and that's what happens at the Battle of the Tenaru or the Ilu River or Alligator Creek, it's known as all three. Let the record show part of the nastiness of this area is that instead of alligators, which would be benign compared to what they actually do, they have crocodiles. And on that night when the Japanese attack they're facing Marines in foxholes on the opposite side of this water obstacle, they've strung up a single line of barbed wire as I said, they have two 37mm cannons which are not all that big of a deal you would think, and they've got canister rounds for them which are like shells. They're not just shotgun shells, but it will make a big deal in this battle, they've got some artillery behind them, and when the Japanese attack in several different waves over the course of several hours they are torn to pieces. Eventually the Marines will counter attack, light tanks will be involved later, the likes of which people who saw them said afterwards they had rolled over so many Japanese that the treads of the tanks were completely bespatted with gore. Some 40, 42, 44 Americans lose their lives, between 700 and 800 Japanese lose theirs. Marine Corps veteran Tom Jones is quoted in the book The Things Our Fathers Saw, and he was at the battle of the Tenaru or Alligator Creek or what have you, and he talks about this night encounter, and he writes, We had been able to string a single lane of barbed wire, Japanese barbed wire we had captured. We were on one side of the Tenaru River, and they were coming from the other side, so they had to cross the Tenaru to get to us, and for some reason or another, I don't know, the Japanese attacked on a narrow front. Consequently their casualties in wounded and dead were more or less bunched. They would throw up a flare, and you could see a target. Boy, we laid down a sheet of steel. During the night I think I fired off a hundred rounds or better, and the rifle was an .03. Let me stop here, he means the Model 1903 Springfield rifle, which was the usual thing the Marines were using. I think the rifle was an .03. It kicks like a mining mule. It's a very accurate rifle. The next morning I had a jaw on me like I had the mumps, that damn rifle kicking me. Well the next morning we counted something like 600 dead Japs, and we found out it was the Ichiki Battalion. It was supposed to be the premier fighting group of the Japanese, and it had considerable success in the Philippines and the Orient, and they were hastily sent on to Guadalcanal, and that was just the first battle. End quote. It's at the Tenaru though that everybody gets the same lesson that Mike Edson and his Marine Raiders had gotten on to Loggie. The Japanese, wounded, after a Marine counterattack at that battle, start killing themselves in full view of the Marines. In Touched with Fire, the Land War in the South Pacific historian Eric Berger writes, quote, Crushed by Marine defenses and a counterattack, 800 Japanese infantry perished. The death throes of the Ichiki detachment took place in daylight, and hundreds of Marines watched events unfold. Many wounded Japanese took hand grenades, armed them, and then held them to their heads. This type of behavior was incomprehensible to a Marine. But far worse, he writes, several of the wounded tried to kill Marines who were attempting to take prisoners. Infantryman Andy Polini was involved in the closing stage of the battle. Now Berger quotes this Guadalcanal veteran, quote, End quote.
SPEAKER_02: There was also a battle that really soured the Marines. It may have been a misunderstanding, but the way it was explained to everybody was that the Japanese had sent somebody to tell the Marines that there was this detachment ready to surrender, and when the Marines went to take their surrender, they ambushed the detachment instead and cut them up with swords. Marine Corps General Vandergrift, who is a hard man already, I mean, this is the old breed right here, right? He's quoted in Richard Frank's Guadalcanal writing a letter just a couple days after witnessing the Tenaru that we just talked about and trying to explain to the Southern General what he'd seen, and he wrote, quote, And then blow themselves and the other fellow to pieces with a hand grenade. End quote.
SPEAKER_02: Remember, though, these are lessons that have been learned in the Philippines and Singapore and places like that, and they were being relearned here. Another one of the lessons that's being relearned has to do with the atrocities, which is one of these inexplicable things. We had talked about it earlier. It was heavily studied after the war, not just the Japanese version of it, but the Nazi version of it. I mean, it's a fascinating part of the human condition. Is it a political thing, a cultural thing, a human thing? But you see it again when the Japanese restart their attack on New Guinea, which happens right around the same time Admiral Fletcher is trying to get his aircraft carriers out of Guadalcanal. Part of the reason the Japanese don't respond as well as maybe they could to this American attack at Guadalcanal is their eyes are about 700 miles away on Port Moseby where they're launching an offensive. Remember, they wanted Port Moseby earlier. They wanted to take it at the Battle of Coral Sea by sea, but because of the way that battle turned out, that scotched that attempt. This time they're going to try to take it via the overland route. They already have tiny little beachheads on Northern New Guinea. Right around the time the Guadalcanal landings happen, they land more and more troops. They trickle them in and they start coming over land. There's this thing called the Kokoda Track or the Kokoda Trail, which is a trail over the Owen Stanley Mountains from Northern New Guinea at the tail, the eastern tail of New Guinea. At the other end of the Kokoda Track basically is Port Moseby. So the Japanese are going to come over this trail and take Port Moseby via land. Right away they start committing the same kind of atrocities that have become a trademark of theirs in this war. And they are the sorts of things that poison their enemies against them. And if you believe some of the evidence that seems to be out there, you could make a case that this may have been by design. News of earlier Japanese atrocities in places like Singapore and elsewhere have filtered back in bits and pieces. When the Japanese start moving up from New Guinea, they famously will murder some religious folk and their families. And there are accounts that are more vicious and terrible and emotional and heartbreaking than others. You can only imagine this stuff though in the era of phone videos and viral sharing of the war porn type stuff. But in Hirohito's war, Francis Pike has a relatively low key rundown. After talking about how a couple of nuns or nurses are murdered famously, he writes, Australian Anglican priest, Father James Benson was more fortunate. He was taken prisoner and transported to Rabaul and miraculously survived the war. In another incident, at the Anglican Mission in Sangara, the Reverend Henry Holland and Reverend Vivian Hedlich were beheaded along with co-workers. Showing a peculiar mercy, a captured six-year-old boy who became distraught was shot in the head. Sasebo 5th SNLF, that's a naval force, troops, according to the captured Japanese diary of Toshio Sato, beheaded seven Australian men and women, including a 16-year-old girl. Now quoting from the diary, quote, they held her down screaming and crying while they cut off her head, end quote. Even Toshio Sato, Pike writes, an interpreter working in Buna, was horrified. Records of murders and massacres by Japanese troops were perfunctorily recorded. First class seaman Shunji Shin noted in his diary, quote, 14th August, about 8 a.m., decapitated or shot the nine prisoners, end quote. In the book Japan at War and Oral History, Haruko Tayakuk and Theodore F. Cook include the thoughts of a lot of different Japanese folk from a lot of different perspectives. But some of these perspectives are the kind of people that sound like allied propaganda caricatures. In one chapter they have a guy, and they go into depth, these aren't little quotes, but the guy says, if I went more than two weeks without me taking a head, I didn't feel right, meaning decapitating people. He talks about getting requests all the time from other officers. Do you have any prisoners in the jail we can use? I want to test my new sword. Now normally these were Chinese prisoners. It's one of the reasons you mysteriously look and go, now with all the Chinese troops that fell into Japanese hands, they should have giant POW camps full of Chinese prisoners, shouldn't they? One of the things, and this is a famous Samuel Elliot Morrison story, that historian, he talks about, and I'm going from memory here, but it's one of those things that sears into your brain. He talks about a couple of Australians the Japanese captured right during this early advance up to Kokoda, and they had been, he said, bayoneted, tied to a tree and bayoneted. And then some Japanese soldier who could speak and write English had put above his head on a placard hung by the dead Australian. He took a long time to die. And then of course they were found by Australian troops. You can only imagine what that does to those soldiers and how they feel. Australian soldier Bill Crooks is quoted in Burgarids Touched with Fire, and he makes it sound like there's not really hate involved as much as, well, he says, quote, I don't know that we were indoctrinated with a hate for the Jap. We knew what they had done in Nanking. We knew that they had machine gunned our nurses on Banka Island. We knew that they'd bayoneted Australian prisoners after they captured Rabaul. We knew they'd bayoneted hospital inmates in their advance down the Malayan Peninsula. But we did not develop a hatred. We just would kill every bastard soul of them the moment we came against them. We knew their Bushido Banzai code was to take no prisoners in battle and never surrender. So we killed them. End quote. When we talked about this same kind of Japanese atrocious behavior in Singapore, for example, in Malaya, and asked where it came from, we quoted Japanese officers who would often make the excuse about a bunch of soldiers who were in the hot blood of combat, who'd lost their buddies, and it was understandable they get out of control, maybe a little institutional laxity, you know, that kind of understandable, you know, boys will be boys kind of an excuse. But the Australians will capture Japanese rarely, but they will. And there's an affidavit that was used in the war crimes trials after the war, which are very much more sketchy in the Pacific than they were in Europe, by the way. But this is cataloged in Lord Russell of Liverpool's book, The Knights of Bushido. And he quotes an Australian officer who right around this same period, he'll also found Australian troops who'd been mutilated and tortured by the Japanese, not the same Australian Samuel Elliot Morrison was talking about, but other ones. And not only did they luckily capture a Japanese soldier, but one who spoke English. So they asked him about what's going on here, right? And here's how the affidavit describes it. Captain Kendall says, quote, and I hope I get some of these place name pronunciations correct, quote, On the track leading from Wagga Wagga to Lillehe, I saw the body of another Australian soldier with his hands tied behind his back, lying face downwards. He was tied with a string. He had a wound on his leg with a field dressing on it, and he had the top of his head cut right off. The top portion of the skull was lying forward as if it had been cut through with a heavy knife or sword and had been chopped from the rear. He also had lacerations crisscrossing his back and shoulders. They appeared to be knife or sword wounds, and it cut right through the shirt into his flesh. Two days later, a Japanese soldier was captured at Ahioma. He spoke English, and I showed him the bodies of the two Australian soldiers whom I previously mentioned. He told me that he was attached to the landing party, and that the ill treatment and torturing of Australian troops was done by the order of their officers, so that the Japanese soldiers would fight and not surrender, because the same things would be done to them now that these atrocities have been committed on the Australians. End quote. That's the very opposite, isn't it, of what the excuse was in the Singapore situation in Malaya. This is the officers making the soldiers essentially participate in the atrocities as a way to keep any of them who might think about surrendering into line. Most of them wouldn't, right? They're basically fanatical about their devotion here, and they know what the society expects of them. They don't want to come back home and put shame on their family and all that, so they're going to do their duty. But for any of you who are thinking maybe you just might surrender, take the easy way out, well now that we've forced you to commit these atrocities, human beings being what they are, what do you think those Australians and Americans will do to you? Might as well not surrender, right? There's a sort of an evil Machiavellian, but at the same time sort of that twisted genius of an understanding of how human nature works that maybe trapped these Japanese into this situation. I mean, again, I always say you could be born in Japan at the time period that would have made you old enough to be in the service at this time. Think about how this traps you if you're a good person and you don't want to have anything to do with something like that. There was an evil war in so many ways.
SPEAKER_00: If a car is worth a dollar, Dan and Ben would love to have it. A buck a show, it's all we ask. Go to DanCarlin.com for information on how to donate to the show.
SPEAKER_02: In his book, Touched with Fire, historian Eric Bergerit writes, quote, US Marines and Australian infantry developed an odd affinity. They never fought on the same battlefield, but a mutual respect developed across theaters. When the US 1st Marine Division was sent to recuperate in Australia after Guadalcanal and later set up training camp there, Marines and Aussies frequently crossed paths, with a brawl or two punctuating the Mutual Admiration Society. Marine Donald Fall expresses a common sentiment. Now quoting Fall, quote, I fought with the 1st Marine Division from Guadalcanal until I got too close to Japanese mortar fire on Peleliu. I'm not bragging, but I think we were the best, period. Except for maybe the Aussies. If anyone could fight as well as the Corps, it was Aussies. If it was up to me, they would have all been inducted into the Marines then and there. End quote. Australia is a country with 7 million people around this time period. The United States, by the way, 131 million somewhere in there. And yet, it will come to them to have this moment in New Guinea of their own while Guadalcanal is going on, where they combat the Japanese on the Kokoda Trail. And it is a potential bar brawl, especially for an American, to start saying which is the more famous Australian military history moment. The landing and fighting at Kalipoli in 1915. Or the fighting on the Kokoda Trail. But we'll find out how that goes in Part 5 of Supernova in the East.
SPEAKER_03: How far do you go in trying to recreate a negative human historical experience so that people can get a tiny little taste of it?
SPEAKER_02: That was one of the fascinating questions we dealt with when trying to put together our, we call it an immersive memory project, War Remains. For those of you who don't know, we put together what you would think of as virtual reality. Got the headsets on, walk around. But it also was a destination event. So there was a real trench kind of built with barbed wire and rats and stuff you can touch and it matched what you saw in your headset. And we thought it was kind of cool. But the number one complaint we had about it was, how come it's not nearer to me? Or how come I can't get tickets? Or how come I can't go? Or when's it coming around here? And I couldn't answer those. But now I can. Many of you said, why don't you just make a home edition? Easier said than done, as I'm sure you really understood. But we did it. And it's available now. And if you were one of those people that said I want a home edition, well, here it comes. Bad news is you don't get trench included or people to set it up. That part of the experience from the live event is sacrificed. There are compensating elements added instead. The sound is still unbelievable. That was done, if you don't know, by the guys at Skywalker Labs in Northern California, the Lucas guys. And they took to this with enthusiasm. It was kind of a fun project for them. And I liked watching them have a great time with it. So the sound is awesome. The graphics and the commitment to historical realism was fun to watch. The guys over at Flight School in Texas took that on and they were fantastic. And then Madison Wells Media, who put this whole thing together. I mean, they asked me over and over and over again, the bottom line was always the same. What do you want, Dan? Does this look good to you, Dan? Is this what you had in mind, Dan? Do you want to do? I mean, they didn't let me do a $250 million, two and a half hour movie like experience with the VR. But we'll get there, you know, baby steps. Nonetheless, the questions were fantastic, including things like, how badly do we hurt the people who go through and experience the process? And of course, people on the other side said, What do you mean you don't hurt them at all? I said, Well, World War One would hurt them. How loud do you make the shelling? Well, if this is too loud, it'll hurt their hearing. Well, it hurt the veterans hearing. Half of them came back half deaf. So those are kind of some fun, interesting trade offs. I wanted to make it so that there was a knob or a button. So you could like a hot sauce heat level of spice at your Thai restaurant, you could tell them, Oh, I need mild. Or I need medium or I like it really hot. And they can touch different elements of you, your psyche, your emotion, your mentality, your humanity. But this is a new realm of media that allows us to do this in a different way. I don't think you've ever seen anything like it. If you want to give it a try, I should let you know. It's $4.99, which is the same as saying $5. Let's just call it $5.99. You can buy it on the Steam Oculus and the HTC Vive port storefronts. And it can be experienced on the Oculus Rift, the Oculus Rift S, HTC Vive, HTC Vive Pro. And you know, if I have my way more eventually, thank you so much for all the support, kind words and everything else. Those of you who've already been through it have provided and for those of you who said, Why don't you get your act together and come out with a home version? Well, there you go. Go to warremains.com if you need more.
