Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway | Jonathan Parshall, Anthony Tully |...

Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway | Jonathan Parshall, Anthony Tully | Shattered Sword

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Shattered Sword: T...

	Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway Jonathan Parshall, Anthony Tully Potomac Books Inc., 2007 - 568 pages average customer review:based on 115 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Excellent work!

This book provides an account of the Midway battle from the Japanese perspective, and sheds light on previous works and accounts which have long been considered accurate. I was looking for one, complete, definitive book for this battle, and this is definitely the right one. The amount of new information presented (as of 2005) on an event that took place over 60 years ago is incredible. Kudos to Parshall and Tully for their research and presentation. This book is one of the best I have read in years. I highly recommend ii!

Shattered Sword

The outstanding feature of this book is putting under a microscope the thinking that went into the planning of the "Battle of Midway" from the Japanese perspective. We see information that changes our picture of 'things we thought we knew.'
One of the more interesting features of the book is a study of how aircraft carriers operated, and the differences between the American carriers and the Japanese vessels.
There is also a clear picture of the structure of the Japanese aircraft command, and of the way in which the American pilots flew.
My favorite of all.......

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Fantastic!

This is simply the best book yet written on the subject of the battle of Midway. Period!

A word of warning, however. It presumes the reader has read previous books on the subject. In order to get the most out of this book possible, one should read Fuchida's "Midway: the Battle that Doomed Japan," Prange's "Miracle at Midway," and Lord's "Incredible Victory," as considerable space is devoted to analysing and debunking those works.

The discussion of how the Japanese carrier force conducted its flight ops, Japanese naval doctrine, and the quandries faced by VADM Nagumo during the course of the battle are top notch. The accounts of Hiryu's afternoon attacks on Yorktown are also the best I've yet read, though I have not read Lundstrom.

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A Very Good Revisionist History but undermined by weak hypothesis

There is no doubt that Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway is a landmark piece of revisionist history that adds great depth to our understanding of this pivotal battle in the war of the Pacific. Thanks to the efforts of co-authors Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, readers will get to see far more of the Japanese side of the battle than has been heretofore presented in English. In addition to disposing of a number of long-standing myths about the battle (e.g., Japanese carrier decks loaded with aircraft, the Tone scout plane, etc) the authors make a major effort to define the unique features of Japanese carrier operations and how this contributed to the battle's outcome. In these terms, the book is a great success. However, the authors seemed unsatisfied with merely writing a groundbreaking history and instead over-extended by presenting a hypothesis that claims that faulty Japanese doctrine was really to blame for their defeat. After achieving a dazzling success in the first two-thirds of their book, the author's then pound their credibility into dust in the last third in a futile attempt to prove their hypothesis.

Up front, I must note that the maps, charts, tables and photos that support this work are superb. It is rare in a military history text that readers are presented with this kind of detail that leaves room for few follow-up questions. The 24 chapters are well arranged and the narrative flows well, at least concerning the battle itself. Both authors are to be applauded for meticulous research and attention to detail.

Unfortunately, the main hypothesis that the author's continually try to peddle is a house of cards. In essence, the authors argue that Japan developed a carrier doctrine that called for massing all available airpower into a massive, coordinated multi-carrier strike that could inflict devastating results. The authors say that mass was more important to Japanese carrier leaders than speed and that they blew their chance at Midway when they did not launch whatever they had available when the first US aircraft carrier was spotted. By waiting to mass their forces, the Japanese took too long and were ultimately smashed by the faster, but weaker US carrier strikes. Thus, the authors argue that faulty doctrine was the root cause of the Japanese defeat. There were other factors as well - a poor operational plan by Yamamoto, an inadequate air search plan, sloppy tactical mistakes - but it was allegedly faulty doctrine that is marked as the main culprit.

I have to admit that I am uneasy when I see civilians discussing military doctrine and this book fosters that kind of apprehension. Many civilians have difficulty accepting the concept of military doctrine and tend to see it as a straitjacket, rather than as a series of useful guidelines. Simply put, there really are no military doctrines that are faulty, although they may be employed improperly. By definition, doctrine is a group of tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) that have been successfully demonstrated to most efficiently accomplish a given task. If a given set of TTPs failed in combat, they would not be adopted as `doctrine.' Does anyone believe either now or in 1942 that "mass" is not one of the principles of war? While it might be true that had the Japanese launched whatever ready aircraft they had on 4 June 1942 against the first US carrier contact that they might have landed the first blow, this is a situation-dependent conclusion not a doctrine-related issue. As the author's make small note of, the Japanese did precisely that at the earlier Battle of the Coral Sea - send out most of their planes against the first contact - and ended up sinking a US oiler and destroyer, not a carrier group. As any old hand at intelligence work could attest, the first spot report is usually wrong and to develop a doctrine based on committing your main strike force against the first report in is asking for trouble.

The authors make a lot of good points about the inadequacies of the Japanese combat air patrol and their inadequate flak, both of which contributed greatly to the success of the main American dive-bomber attacks. Yet Japanese carrier doctrine was no more faulty on June 4, 1942 than French `methodical battle' was faulty in May 1940 - they were just executed under the wrong conditions. Attacking an island with a large, alert air garrison was really not a job for Kido Butai (the Japanese carrier fleet) in the first place. Once the possibility of American carriers intervening became feasible, Japanese doctrine became even more inappropriate since it would have to deal with too many potential missions at once. Just like the French, the Japanese doctrine was suited to a methodical action where they could anticipate the battle rhythm, mass their forces and hurl them in great strength against a single target at a time. It was ill suited to the free-flow brawl at sea that actually ensued.

The author's also tend to use a great deal of Japanese terminology in this book. That's great when you get details in a foreign language right, but here I'm afraid they either didn't check with a Japanese speaker or relied on machine translations, since there are a number of ungrammatical usages in Japanese. Even with four years of college-level Japanese, I went and checked my Kenkyusha's Japanese-English dictionary and found a number of "non-words" in play here. All in all, Shattered Sword is a very good book but the author's inability to comprehend the nature of military doctrine and the principles of war lays waste to much of their hypothesis and their Japanese language gaffes diminish their credibility somewhat.

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Useful Revisionist Information/Overzealous Conclusions

This book adds immeasurably to our understanding of the Midway battle; the authors are to be commended for their research which debunks some Japanese myths--many of which were propagated by Fuchida. For this, it rates 4 stars. However, the authors use this research to take creative license in reinterpreting the battle in a way that diminishes the "Incredible Victory" or "Miracle At Midway" theme of other Western authors. On this score, I think the authors go too far in their revisionist interpretation...Nagumo's fleet and aircrews, compared to the American's, were just too good. Midway was akin to a college football team beating a defending Super Bowl champion...which is why it was so incredible or "miraculous".

American aircrews without question demonstrated considerable bravery and determination in their attacks on Nagumo's carriers, but did not demonstrate much skill. The brilliant exception was the critical 1020 attacks by Yorktown/Enterprise, which Prange had described previously as an "uncoordinated coordinated" attack. That Enterprise's SBDs attacked simultaneous to the Yorktown's combined torpedo/dive bombing attack was most fortunate--perhaps even "miraculous"--given the piecemeal massacre of just about all other American aircraft that morning. The American's--with the exception of the Yorktown's air group--couldn't or wouldn't coordinate attacks even though their lives greatly depended upon it. This demonstrated weaknesses in American tactics/doctrine/leadership (Browning/Mitscher??) that could have been just as self-defeating as those that Parshall/Tulley illustrate and deplore of the Japanese. The US Army, for example, could have filled the sky with hundreds of B-17s bombing from 20,000 ft, and the result probably would have been the same--no hits. The Yorktown's aircrew unquestionably were the Pacific Fleet's "A" team; the Enterprise's aircrew were something less. The Hornet's aircrew--with the exception of Waldron's VT-8--hardly seemed fit to be in the battle. If American marksmanship failed to deliver ordinance accurately on Nagumo's carriers, it didn't matter how screwed up the Japanese operational plan was revealed to be in the postmortems--they would have won anyway.

Consider that the first dive bombing counterstrike against TF-17 by Hiryu's Kobayashi--launched "piecemeal" at 1057--by 1211 had temporarily disabled the Yorktown despite radar/lack of surprise, fierce CAP, and formidable anti-aircraft fire. They did this with 7 aircraft scoring three direct hits and 2 very near misses, "an enviable rate of accuracy in anyone's book". The American's never came close to this marksmanship. The authors question why it took so long for Tomonaga's even smaller torpedo strike to launch from Hiryu at 1330 (page 283-284) following Kobayashi--the much bigger question is why hadn't Spruance/TF-16 followed up their 1020 SBD attacks to prevent Tomonaga's 1330 launch in the first place? Was Spruance/Browning twiddling their thumbs or what? "Scouting" hardly seems a reasonable explanation for delay because of the short distance between the fleets and the smoking beacons of the three burning Japanese carriers. This allowed Tomonaga's 10-plane torpedo strike to disable Yorktown for good at 1445, with 2 hits from the 6 torpedoes launched in the face of ferocious resistance. Two small but successful strikes launched by Hiryu...while TF-16 didn't even get one followup strike in the air. This should be scandalous.

The Americans by all accounts had surprise, quantitative parity at the point of attack, and good intelligence. But without the marksmanship of aviators such as Richard Best--who singlehandedly took out the Akagi (this act alone seems somewhat of a "miracle")--the much more competent Japanese undoubtably would have won the day. Parshall/Tully minimalizes this too much for my tastes.

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