The battle of Midway!  My friends, this is one of the most hallowed events in history to which many books have been devoted.  This one, first released in 2005, tells the story largely from the Japanese point of view with the Americans only occasionally stepping onto center stage, providing a unique perspective on the battle from conception to combat to aftermath with several appendixes devoted to minute details related to the Japanese side such as what the authors think would have happened had the Japanese tried to land their landing force on Midway had the US fleet been routed (resulting in a bloody repulse, they conclude with convincing argument) and the wreckage from the carrier Kaga found by an expedition in 1999.   All in all, it is a comprehensive read put out by the men who founded a website devoted to the Imperial Japanese Navy at: http://www.combinedfleet.com/kaigun.htm

There is, however, an off-setting undercurrent to the book: Parshall and Tully say they wrote Shattered Sword in part because of supposed fabrications put forth by the famous warrior-turned-priest Mitsuo Fuchida, leader of the Pearl Harbor attack later wounded at Midway who co-wrote a book about the battle (not penned all by himself, as Shattered Sword mistakenly implies.)  In short, they argue Fuchida lied about how adequate communications were aboard Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s flagship Akagi, that he exaggerated how long it took the Japanese carriers to launch and recover planes, that there was no such thing as a “two-phase” search in Japanese carrier doctrine at the time of Midway as opposed to his saying there was, and that the Japanese carriers were in no way ready to launch an attack when the first three of Nagumo’s four flattops were knocked out of battle by American dive bombers and Fuchida later lied that they were.   I did not swallow any of these arguments whole, and believe the amount of evidence they present still leaves the door wide open to debate and that Fuchida can be defended against such charges.

I also found their iconoclastic argument that the United States did not win against overwhelming odds and their argument that most other Midway books subscribe to this so-called “myth” to be equally nettlesome.  The latter argument can be dismissed as just that (an argument), and as for the former, well, it is easy to say almost seventy years later that, thanks to the Japanese fleet being widely dispersed, we had it relatively easy.   Yet the fact that Admiral Raymond Spruance prudently kept his forces close to Midway not wanting to risk an encounter with superior enemy surface forces, I believe, torpedoes this argument; dispersed or not, Isoroku Yamamoto’s superior surface forces boasting powerful battleships, and cruisers and destroyers packing torpedoes so deadly they could put a hole as big as a house into an enemy capital ship were not something an outnumbered opponent wanted to risk even the slightest risk of crossing cutlasses with.  Also, this argument ignores how the US intelligence information on Japanese strength, while substantial, did not know that Yamamoto had deployed his “main body” of ships to the operation, making them, I believe, a very clear and present threat to the US simply because we did not know they were there, and could have provided a nasty surprise had Spruance given in to his staff’s exhortations to chase Nagumo’s beaten task force as the decisive first day of battle drew to a close.

Space prevents me from going on, but I would like to say that while I think this book deserves a read by serious students of WWII, keep the proverbial salt shaker handy and your mind open.