June 4, 2007
Midway at 65 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:50 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s lead piece on this website today, “The Miracle at Midway,” echoes the title of Gordon Prange’s celebrated 1983 book on the battle, and recounts the great story economically and I think with perfect accuracy. Was Midway a miracle in the modern sense of the word, meaning a vastly improbable event? The improbability of the outcome is somewhat diminished by writers who stress the successes of the American code-breakers, but superior intelligence on the enemy’s plan cannot alone explain the outcome; the British had that at Crete. The outcome at Midway was certainly a stroke of great luck. The U.S. Navy, which fought against great odds, inflicted savage, irreplaceable, and disproportionate losses, did so with inferior aircraft and less experienced pilots, and seized the strategic initiative from Japan. Had the Japanese sighted American ships at different times, or had different types of planes been airborne or below deck at different moments, it is certainly possible to imagine the destruction of the U.S. Navy’s fleet carriers and the preservation of the Japanese carriers. Reading about Midway tends to reduce one’s sense of the miraculous because it gives a sense of the vast role of luck in that particular naval battle, one of the handful of carrier battles ever fought, in most of which luck seems to have had significant sway. Luck was imagined to have less of a role when admirals modeled surface engagements in the age of ironclad battleships—the hitting power of guns versus the effectiveness of armor seemed to make the thing a pretty pure science—but there were not too many battles between ironclad fleets, any more than there would be a lot of carrier battles, and at one of the most famous of them, Jutland, luck again had a pretty large role. There was also, of course, a lot of luck on Hitler’s side in the Battle of France—probably more than the Americans enjoyed at Midway—and one lesson of military and naval history is that we may be inclined to understate the role of luck in shaping the outcomes of great events. Historians enjoy explaining outcomes, and acknowledging a very large role for luck does not do much for developing a system of explanation that looks like a science. Neither generals, admirals, nor historians have much of a bias in favor of luck as an explanation of events. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule. Napoleon, who was not without faith in his own skill, was nonetheless interested in the role of fortune on battlefields, and famously asked of any general proposed for a command, “Is he lucky?” But if Midway saw a lot of luck on our side, it is not, I think, too easy to imagine a resulting Japanese victory (or stalemate) in World War II had the luck run the other way. I remember hearing more than once that the United States built (from the keel up) and launched more than a hundred major surface combatants over the course of the war, and the comparable number for Japan was zero. I am not absolutely certain of those numbers, but they are at least close to correct. We were also making steadily better weapons, training better pilots, developing better doctrine. Luck could decide battles in the Pacific, but no plausible amount of battlefield luck could save Japan; if we were willing to see it through, we were going to win. That, of course, is probably true of almost all the wars we have fought: Iraq may be an exception, but Vietnam, although it is very unfashionable to say so, probably wasn’t. Japan was convinced that American willingness to absorb casualties in a war fought thousands of miles from our shores was relatively slight and would be the key to their victory. They got that wrong, of course. In retrospect, their decision to risk so much on that assumption seems mad. Iran and Syria, which arm Iraqis with specialized weapons to kill Americans, and in the case of Iran send advisers to assist, make a similar calculation, yet no one calls them mad for doing so. That seems strange, in its way stranger than the outcome at Midway.
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