Puttering in the Study

Pacific Thunder: The US Navy's Central Pacific Campaign, August 1943–October 1944 - Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

This book focuses on the U.S. Navy's Central Pacific drive from August 1943 to October 1944.  It really begins ten months earlier with the last of the 1942 carrier battles, Santa Cruz, which left the U.S. with only one damaged carrier, Enterprise, in the South Pacific to face the entire Japanese navy.  It contrasts that with the picture only 24 months later, when after the Battle of Leyte Gulf the U.S. had nine light and nine heavy CVs, with another three working up and twelve more in the pipeline, and the Japanese navy was virtually destroyed as a fighting unit.

Unfortunately, my practice of reading every book on this subject that I can on the Kindle and several at the same time means I don't recall much about each particular book.  So while I don't have anything negative to say about the book, it just didn't make much of an impression.  

First Man - the annotated screenplay - Josh Singer

I picked this up to see what decisions they made making the movie - how much was strictly accurate, how much was moved around or modified, and what was admittedly created for the movie. And I absolutely loved it.

As you’d expect, the book reveals the movie that was written, the movie that was filmed, and almost all of the movie as it was edited - the book wrapped four weeks before the film did so some final cuts aren’t reflected.  

Hellcat: The F6F in World War II - Barrett Tillman

I pick up Tillman's books whenever I see them as reference material, but decided to read this one as I'm getting close to building my first Hellcat model.  The book was surprisingly light on the design and origins of the F6F, and is devoted more to blow by blow, day by day accounts of the operational career of the aircraft.  It's dense, but interesting.  Frustratingly, the book is printed in sepia toned ink, so the photos are even less useful as references.

World War II At Sea: A Global History - Craig Symonds

I've enjoyed listening to Craig Symonds' Midway book at least twice now, so I thought I'd give his naval history of World War II a try.  The problem with reading so much similar history, however, is that unless I take notes while reading I have no clear recollection of the book when I'm done.  I liked it, and I know I saw a few minor errors (ship names or types), but I can't be much more specific than that - with two exceptions where I learned things I definitely didn't know. before

First, Symonds emphasized that WW II was in fact a naval war above all else because the U.S.'s sea lift capacity was the determining factor in the war.  With due respect to the Red Army, what enabled the Allied victory was America's ability to build the ships to keep Britain from starving, and at the same time create the sea lift capacity to project its military overseas in both theaters of the war.  We forget that every solider, weapon, bullet, and box of supplies had to be carried over thousands of miles of seas on ships, and the ability to build the ships that did that was what won the war.  Naval engagements almost pale in comparison to the race to build adequate shipping, because without it there was no way the Allies could have gone on the offensive in either theater.  The shipping necessary to keep small tasks forces at seas for a few weeks at a time was one thing.  The shipping necessary to carry and supply 

Second, scratch any account of the American campaigns in either theater and you hear about the overriding need for "landing craft" but this was the first book that explained what was being referred to.  Yes, the services needed craft to carry soldiers to the beaches, but according to Symonds it was the LSTs - landing ship "tank" that were pure gold, as they brought to the beaches (over and over) the supplies and hardware that enabled troops to fight once ashore.  The Allies forces never had immediate access to port facilities after amphibious assaults, making LSTs the lifeline for both the Army and the Marines.  Eisenhower postponed Overlord a month to get a handful more, underscoring that they were the crucial bottleneck in 1942-44 in the same way that escort vessels had been two years earlier.   

On the other side, the lack of sea lift doomed the Japanese war effort from the beginning, when the garrison on Guadalcanal could not be adequately supplied.  The undersized and similarly undersupplied U.S. forces could have been forced off the island, but Japan could never assemble sufficient strength to do so.  The reason was that the Americans controlled the air, but the campaign is still an illustration of the crucial role that (adequately protected) sea lift played. Then, once the problems with American torpedoes were fixed, the U.S. submarine campaign completely throttled Japanese industry.  Conversely, the American forces in the Pacific were able to project themselves across thousands of miles of empty ocean because they had sufficient shipping.  In the European theater, after the landings at Normandy supplies only had to cross a few dozen miles of Allied-controlled sea, and even without port facilities the necessary supplies were landed.  Even the destruction of one of the two "Mulberry" artifical harbors did not fatally crimp the supply chain, as the LSTs' beach unloading produced an equivalent amount of supplies. 

Learning that is what made the book worthwhile to me.

Stanley Johnston's Blunder: The Reporter Who Spilled the Secret Behind the U.S. Navy's Victory at Midway – Elliot Carlson

I saw this 2017 U.S. Naval Institute book at the National WW II Museum in New Orleans a week ago today, and finished it two days later.  It is full of detail you wouldn't expect from a dispute that blew up in 1942 as a result of a Chicago Tribune article containing details of a secret message from CinCPac commander Chester Nimitz to the ships under his command.  That it does is because the article triggered a full scale FBI and Navy investigation which produced numerous documented interviews which became accessible a number of years ago, and eventually a grand jury proceeding, the transcript of which was unsealed just two years ago.  

It's for that reason that we know so much about a piece of note paper in a state room of a ship which was carrying many of the officers and men of the just-sunk carrier Lexington back to San Diego, where it docked just as news was breaking of the Navy's triumph at Midway.  Living in the stateroom with the executive officer of the Lexington was Johnston, an Australian who was working as a war correspondent for the Tribune, and who was already working on the manuscript of his immensely popular book Queen of the Flattops about the Lexington's fight at the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Johnston admitted that he saw and copied the exec's list of Japanese units and ships and units, which were certainly copied from Nimitz' message, since the misspellings in the ship names of the Tribune article matched those of the message. It is also likely he heard what the ships and units referred to - the likely contents of the Japanese fleet bearing down on Midway.  This was because the stateroom became a sort of after-hours hangout for the Lex's former officers, who insisted on having the ship they were hitching a ride on decode the current messages from CinCPac and circulate them. And in addition to conversation identifying what the list of ships referred to, he may have seen the original message itself, security had become so lax on the ship as it plodded towards California.

So when he heard on landing that the Japanese had just lost four carriers at Midway, he realized that the list he was literally carrying in his pocket had four carriers listed on it.  One thing led to another and before the Yorktown had even sunk, the last casualty of the Midway battle, the Tribune was running a front page headline, "NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA" based in part on the note he carried. 

The Navy was furious at having its codebreaking activities event hinted-at, and the Roosevelt administration - who was a frequent target of the Tribune and Navy Secretary Frank Knox - who was publisher of the Tribune's cross-town rival - were as well.  The Administration pressed Attorney General Biddle to prosecute Johnston and the paper's editor under the Espionage Act - the only such prosecution of a newspaper during the entire conflict, but the prosecution fell apart in the middle of the grand jury proceeding when the Navy refused, point-blank, to provide witnesses to testify about its code breaking activities and that the article had caused damage in the form of the changing of Japanese codes.  Without the necessary testimony the special prosecutor (Hoover's Attorney General, as it turned out) could not get the grand jury to indict.  The Navy's wariness was well-founded - if the paper hadn't tipped the Japanese off that their code was compromised, the prosecution certainly would, if it had not already.

Events seemed to have proven the Navy right.  While the Japanese regularly changed the codes during the war, including a week after the prosecution was announced, those were regularly scheduled updates, and the basic structure of the code never changed.  While nothing can be said with absolute certainty, there is no record that Japan ever realized that its codes had been successfully broken.  To put it simply, Japanese intelligence wasn't reading the Chicago Tribune, and also managed to miss the radio and subsequent newspaper articles regarding the grand jury proceedings.

Johnston's was not the only leak of the Japanese order of battle for Midway based on Nimitz' mid-May message, although it was the most public.  According to historian Alvin Kernan, who was on the Enterprise during the battle, historians eventually traced the leak within the Pacific Fleet at least to Admiral Fletcher's sharing the message with his staff while on the Yorktown returning from Coral Sea.  In fact there were numerous leaks already known in 1942, as Carlson points out, noting that they caused prosecuting attorney Mitchell headaches trying to tie any specific leak to Japan's changing their codes - the harm necessary for a prosecution under the Espionage Act. In the end it did not matter because the Navy simply would not talk about the sources of its information.

It's a well-written book about an interesting bit of the Pacific war story.  

Battleship Yamato: Of War, Beauty and Irony - Jan Morris

This is a beautiful little book that defies description.  The best I can say is that it's naval history crossed with bonsai.  It's a short book that notes - it doesn't explain or describe, but instead just notes - the beauty and the irony of the short-lived Japanese superbattleship Yamato. It looks like a well-designed book on Japanese gardening, but has as its subject a battleship.

It's weird, but it's a nice reflection.

1942-43 U.S. Navy aircraft - 1/700 scale

With the adorable Meng Lexington out of the way, it's back to work on the 1/700 scale Yorktown (CV-5) (far left).  What that ship needs now is the same thing my last two 1/700 carriers Lexington (May 1942) (lower right) and Essex (May 1943) (upper right) need, and that is aircraft, and lots of them. 

Coincidentally, all three need the same thing - aircraft in the blue gray over light gray camouflage scheme, as shown by the 1/72 F4Fs and SBD.  Lexington's aircraft still had red roundels and red and white tail stripes at the time of her loss in May 1942 (see 1/72 SBD), but by the time the Yorktown was lost a month later her aircraft had deleted the red roundels and tail stripes (see 1/72 F4F).

Interestingly, the Essex came into service and into Pearl Harbor in May 1943 with aircraft in the same colors, although the left upper and lower wings had the roundel deleted.  As my model shows her in her as-built appearance, I wanted to show her with the blue-gray air group and basically no flight deck markings (the prominent "9" hull numbers are absent) looking a lot more like a 1942 carrier than the other 1943-45 Essex class ships.  So I need SBDs, TBDs and F4Fs for the first two, and SBDs, TBFs and F6Fs for the latter.  For more information on the color schemes used during the period, see this article.

Lexington already has several TBDs and a couple of SBDs, so I will be continuing to assemble and detail the planes I painted for her last year.  Yorktown and Essex both need their air groups painted, so I started that process tonight for both tonight, masking the canopies so they can show as clear later, and
painting the underside of the fuselage zinc chromate green so the interior color will show through the clear cockpits (hopefully - this is a new thing I am trying).  I also painted all the aircraft undersides light gray tonight.  The blue gray topsides will follow later this week after I put one more layer of mask on the cockpits.

You might notice Yorktown appears to already have a full air group - I had painted and decaled up a lot of extra aircraft 26 years ago for a Midway Enterprise, including several Devastators, some with folding wings, so I decided to put those on the flight deck just for morale.  (Mine.  Installing the landing gear on these aircraft is a bear).  The color is two shades wrong - it's what I used back then, but later replaced with a lighter and bluer shade, and last year with the correct dark blue-gray - as shown on the Lexington's aircraft and the 1/72 SBD.  

 

Midway (1976) - how accurate is it?

Parker and I watched Midway the other night, and the question arose how accurate it is?  (For completists, here are my reviews of the DVD in 2006 and the Blu-Ray version in 2016).

 

What's accurate

 

Generally, it's fairly accurate, and tracks what was known of the battle by the mid-1970's, most notably Walter Lord's Incredible Victory (my personal favorite nonfiction book), which was informed by Mitsuo Fuchida's memoir, published in the 1950's, which becomes important later. Specifically, it accurately relates:

• the effect of the Doolittle Raid on Japanese planning
• the codebreakers' activities uncovering Japanese intentions
• Nimitz' efforts to defend Midway, including accepting Halsey's nomination of Spruance, and insisting on sending the damaged Yorktown
• the decisionmaking process by Nagumo during the battle
• the decisionmaking process - in general - on the U.S. carriers
• the carriers' squadrons' attacks on the Japanese carriers (the attacks by Midway squadrons are not shown)

What's not accurate

 

First, the Charlton Heston character, "AirOps" on Nimitz' staff is fictional, but at various stages in the movie plays a role that is identifiable with a historical character.  

 

At the beginning of the movie he approximates the intermediary role of Cdr Edwin Layton, Nimitz' intelligence chief, who - against Washington's (the Redmon brothers) express directions to the contrary, obtained and relayed Rochefort's cryptanalysis results and recommendations directly to Nimitz.  Captain Redmon in Washington, who had no cryptanalysis experience, wanted to interpret the intelligence himself and have only his analysis and recommendations sent to CinCPac - and not the decrypts and analysis from the various codebreaking stations, of which Hypo in Hawaii was only one.

 

There was no senior officer from Nimitz' staff assigned to Fletcher on the Yorktown at Midway - although there had been an intelligence offer assigned at Coral Sea, whose work for Fletcher was the genesis for the leak of the fact that the Navy was reading the Japanese code.  As Alvin Kernan, an Enterprise aircraft ordnanceman noted in both his books, that was open knowledge on the ships at Midway, and recent scholarship has traced the leak back to Fletcher's staff's handling of the information he received from CinCPac on the ride back to Pearl Harbor after Coral Sea.

 

Heston's character also approximates the role of the squadron leader from the Yorktown who led its surviving SBDs to the Enterprise for the afternoon attack on the Hiryu. However in reality the aircraft never landed on Yorktown as it was under attack, and instead were simply redirected to Enterprise, where, less two aircraft that ran out of fuel or were shot down by AA fire while circling, they made up half of the strike that sank the Hiryu.

 

Finally, as the film doesn't show the Yorktown being abandoned, or ever mention its abandonment or sinking, the "Matt Garth" character's death at the end more or less approximates it, at a substantial savings in special effects costs.

 

Second, while Rochefort did wear a smoking jacket and carpet slippers, they were not indications of eccentricity, as Hal Holbrook played him in the movie.  He was working long hours on concrete floors in a room that was decidedly chilly in order to keep the computing equipment operating efficiently.  He was a very serious officer, and not at all eccentric.  He passed away one month after the movie came out, incidentally.  

 

He was most certainly scapegoated by the DC naval intelligence community after the battle for being right.  King turned down Nimitz' recommendation that he receive a medal for his intelligence work, and he was transferred to command a floating drydock in San Francisco.  (I am not making that up). He never went to sea again.

 

Interesting note: Henry Fonda worked as an aide for Nimitz briefly at CinCPac headquarters on Guam in 1944-45. It was not, Fonda recalled, a close relationship, and he assumed Nimitz was irritated at getting a Hollywood star placed on his staff, however briefly.  But it makes his portrayal fascinating to me, because I wonder how much of it is mimcry of a historical figure he actually knew.

 

Second interesting note: both Yamamoto and Nimitz were missing fingers. Yamamoto lost two during the battle of Tsushima, and Nimitz while showing the operation of engines during a tour of an engine room in the 1920's.

 

Post-movie comments

 

The movie's reflection of the battle as a miraculous win - as did all books to that time - was characterized by later authors as "Incredible Victory disease" - a phrase Walter Lord would have loved, I'm sure, because more recent scholarship showed that wasn't the case.  I'm not being sarcastic - I met Lord at a Nimitz Symposium in 1992, and he was fascinated by the scholarship that was coming out even then - he would have been so pleased to have his title tweaked.

 

In 2005 Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway provided the results of analysis of the Japanese side, including computer calculations of the activity on the Japanese carrier hanger decks as they rearmed aircraft using a limited number of bomb and torpedo trucks and aircraft and bomb elevators, which resulted in the conclusion that when Fuchida wrote in the 1950's that the Akagi and other carriers' flight decks were full and they were just about to launch what would have been a fatal strike on the US task forces when they were hit by the dive bombers - he was lying.  He was attempting to portray fate as having intervened at the decisive moment in the battle, when the truth was that the Kido Butai was nowhere near ready to launch an airstrike when the dive bombers arrived.  The timing of their arrival meant absolutely nothing to the outcome of the battle.

 

This underscored the flaw in the Japanese plan that was apparent even in the painfully rigged war games that took place on the Yamato several weeks before, when the officer playing the American forces put his carriers almost exactly where Spruance and Fletcher later would, and sank two of the four Japanese carriers with his initial strike - which with the exception of Dick Best's single bomb which sank the Akagi - was exactly what happened on the morning of June 4. Given the flammability of Japanese carriers while operating aircraft, if they were spotted by US carriers before the US carriers could be destroyed, they would likely be sunk.  There was really no Incredible Victory to the battle - Nimitz had more aircraft, an island target that distracted Nagumo and divided his striking power, and a fairly precise knowledge of how the battle would unfold.  All he had to do was launch before the Japanese carriers did, and it's hard to envision a situation where he would not be able to.

 

The only thing that really made the battle close was the poor performance of the air staff on task Force 16, most notably the bad leadership of the Hornet's air group.  Led by CHAG Stan Ring, Hornet's dive bombers succeeded in missing the Japanese carriers during both strikes in June 4 (he even missed getting in a plane for the afternoon strike), and the near complete failure of the Enterprise's dive bombers to locate the carriers.  The only reason they even had the chance to do so (the famous scene of McCluskey seeing the Arashio is accurate) was because Spruance overruled Halsey's chief of staff Miles Browning who wanted them to keep circling to form up with the torpedo planes.  After a delay of nearly an hour, Spruance sent them along over Browning's objections.  The more experienced Yorktown launched an hour later than Enterprise and Hornet, but placed all three of its squadrons directly on top of the Japanese carriers at the same time.  Even though its squadrons were in some cases flying with each other for the first time, they communicated well before the launch and launched in reverse order, which gave them far more fuel.  Enterprise lost half its two squadrons to fuel exhaustion - Yorktown lost two aircraft of its one squadron.

 

Interesting note - Miles Browning's grandson is Chevy Chase.

 

The real story of the "flight to nowhere" of the Hornet's squadrons didn't really become clear till after 1976 in part because there were never any squadron or other reports written by Ring or Mitscher, so what actually happened was not pieced together until recently.  The movie focuses on what is known - that Torpedo 8 flew straight to the Japanese carriers, but not until recently have historians finally settled on the theory that Ring deliberately flew north of the reported position, hoping to catch the "other two" Japanese carriers.  We forget that at the time he left, only two had been sighted, and Nimitz had told them there were four - and possibly five.  But he didn't - and wouldn't - tell Waldron or anyone else why he was flying the heading he was. As his navigation was known to be erratic, Waldron finally told him - on an open channel overheard by many - to go to hell and turned left to fly straight to the reported position of the carriers.  He likely had no idea that Ring and possibly Mitscher were probably sending him north of the reported position to catch the two carriers they (incorrectly) assumed would be behind the reported location.

 

Shattered Sword found one other interesting fact that undermined what had been a great dramatic point in the movie, and that was the role of the cruiser Tone's Scout #4.  For 60 years historians have blamed Scout #4's delay in launching for the failure of the Japanese to launch their strike at the American carriers before the dive bombers hit.  But, as noted above, it would have made no difference when they knew, because as long as they were landing the returning strike planes and cycling their CAP to respond to the continuing strikes from Midway they could not have launched.

 

But paradoxically, the late launch actually gave them earlier notice, and was an enormous stroke of luck.  In order to get back on schedule, the Tone's pilot only flew partway out on his search leg, then turned to fly across his assigned sector before returning.  It was while flying across his sector that he spotted the Yorktown.   Had he flown his full search arc, then across, then back, he either would not have spotted the US task force at all, or would have seen it substantially later.  Again, Fuchida assigned the fact that the plane assigned to the crucial arc was late to fate, and Lord and other historians followed his lead - but without checking where on his flight he spotted the US carrier.  

 

It's really interesting how inaccurate I harped on the movie being in 2006, but by 2016 I appreciated how it got the big points right.  If it got the Star Trek remastered treatment on special effects, the dramatic portion would work pretty well.

Crossing the Line: A Bluejacket's Odyssey in World War II: The Unknown Battle of Midway - Alvin Kernan

  I've written lengthy blog posts on these two books twice and the computer crashed before they were saved, so let me try to keep it short this time.

Kernan joined the carrier Enterprise at Pearl Harbor a few days before the attack on Pearl Harbor and was there as an enlisted man working on squadron maintenance through the Battle of Midway.  That means that he was on the flight deck of Enterprise when the torpedo planes came back mauled, the fighters came back having never engaged the Japanese, then when the dive bombers came back to report three burning Japanese carriers. 

He then transferred to the Hornet and was on her till she sank at the Battle of Santa Cruz. 

He then became a rear seat gunner and returned to the Enterprise in 1943.  He was looking down at Butch O'Hare's plane from his position as rear gunner in a TBF on night combat patrol when O'Hare was shot down.  If you believe O'Hare was shot down by friendly fire, it was McKernan that did it, although he explains that that isn't what happened - he saw O'Hare flip on his cockpit lights for a second, and then a Japanese planes moved in behind him and shot him down. He did fire shortly before that, but not at O'Hare, he believes.

After that McKernan went into flight training to be a pilot, but given the long line of pilots waiting for assignments, he (and many others) gave up waiting and went back to rear seat work on escort carriers.

After the war McKernan eventually became a classics professor at Yale.  In 1994 he wrote Crossing the Line, which was published by the Naval Institute Press, and is quite simply the best firsthand memoir of the Pacific War I have ever read.  As you might expect from his academic credentials it provides a well-written story of a dirt-poor Depression era boy's experiences as an enlisted man in the Navy, from combat to shipboard life to what life when off the ship was like.  His Forrest Gump-like experiences at Pearl Harbor, Midway, Santa Cruz and with the first night fighter squadrons are just incredible to read.

In 2004 McKernan's memoirs were republished by Yale as part of their Library of Military History series, and the next year he added an analysis of the U.S. torpedo squadrons in The Untold Battle of Midway: The Destruction of the American Torpedo Squadrons, in which he added his firsthand experiences on the Enterprise that day to the by-then extensive literature on the battle, as well as an academic's penchant for research and analysis.

This second book is particularly valuable because of when it came out as well.  By 2005, there had been numerous well-researched accounts of the battle that had revised the original stories about what happened based on newly analyzed information, including earlier that year Parshall and Tully's Shattered Sword (cited in McKernan's bibliography) which extended these revisions to the Japanese side of the battle.  Although McKernan's book ostensibly deals with the torpedo squadrons, it actually includes an extensive analysis of the tactical conduct of the battle using all this later scholarship about, for example, why the Yorktown was so effective on June 4, and the Hornet - and to a significant degree Enterprise, was not. 

Earlier accounts of the American side of the battles were hamstrung by not having the then-classified information reflecting the US carriers' tactical plan for the day (Enterprise and Hornet were cocked and locked to attack as soon as the Japanese carriers were sighted, with Yorktown deliberately held in reserve - that was not known for at least half a century), as well as by the almost complete dearth of action report-type information from the Hornet's squadrons.  It took decades for historians like McKernan to reconstruct what actually happened to Torpedo 8 and and Bombing and Scouting 8, but by 2005 the pieces were available to tell the story that Hornet's captain Marc Mitscher and particularly its air group commander Stanhope Ring apparently did not want told.

So while Crossing is an invaluable memoir, Unknown is a useful addition to the Midway corpus, and actually a good short study of the tactics on the US side.

Occasionally we are fortunate to have someone there when history is made who is observant and able to feed their experiences directly into the historical record.  McKernan is the best example of this I have yet encountered.  

SBDs at the Naval Aviation Museum - from models in 1978 to the actual combat-flown aircraft in 2018

In 1978 when my dad took me to the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, I was able to see a model of a dive bomber that flew from old USS Lexington (CV-2) in early 1942.

When Parker and I went this week we saw an actual dive bomber that flew from the Lexington in early 1942. And that's only part of its history.

Bu No. 2106 was at Pearl Harbor during the attack on December 7, then flew with Bombing 2 with the Lexington, then was reassigned to a Marine dive bombing squadron and sent to Midway where, you guessed it, it was sent out to attack the Japanese carriers on June 4. It's the only known aircraft in existence to have fought at Midway, where it made it back to the island with over 200 bullet holes, as shown in the attached photo.

The plane was retired to training duty, and sank in Lake Michigan. It was recovered recently and completely restored to its June 1942 condition (minus the bullet holes).

Amazing.