Midway Inquest: Why the Japanese Lost the Battle of Midway (Twentieth-Century Battles) [Hardcover]

Dallas W. Isom (Author)

Book Description

Series: Twentieth-Century Battles | Publication Date: July 19, 2007

Midway, the most famous naval battle in American history, has been the subject of many excellent books. However, none satisfactorily explain why the Japanese lost that battle, given their overwhelming advantage in firepower. While no book may ever silence debate on the subject, Midway Inquest answers the central mystery of the battle. Why could the Japanese not get a bomber strike launched against the American carrier force before being attacked and destroyed by American dive bombers from the Enterprise and Yorktown? Although it is well known that the Japanese were unable to launch an immediate attack because their aircraft were in the process of changing armament, why wasn't the rearming operation reversed and an attack launched before the American planes arrived? Based on extensive research in Japanese primary records, Japanese literature on the battle, and interviews with over two dozen Japanese veterans from the carrier air groups, this book solves the mystery at last.

(2008)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Even Nelson's victory at Trafalgar and Togo's at Tsushima Strait—where outnumbered naval forces also won spectacular victories—pale in comparison with the most striking aspect of the Battle of Midway: the lethal damage that determined the outcome was done during a two minute period when three of the four Japanese aircraft carriers were set ablaze by American dive bomber" —from Midway Inquest

(2008)

""... presents a carefully crafted indictment of Japanese decision making during this pivotal World War II sea battle."" —Proceedings, May 2008

(Proceedings )

"Any student of the Pacific War will enjoy this book, even if you disagree with part of it. It is a fascinating look at decisions made in the heat of battle." —Paper Wars, August 2008

(Paper Wars )

About the Author

Dallas Woodbury Isom is a retired professor of law at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. He lives in San Ramon, California.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press; annotated edition edition (July 19, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253349044
• ISBN-13: 978-0253349040
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #515,136 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Save your money, December 11, 2007

By 

Jeffrey F. Bell (Honolulu, HI United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Midway Inquest: Why the Japanese Lost the Battle of Midway (Twentieth-Century Battles) (Hardcover)

This book purports to shed new light on the Battle of Midway, but actually it is a smoke screen. It just might be the worst book on the Pacific War I have ever read.

The basic problem is that the author explicitly set out to exonerate the senior Japanese officers who are traditionally assigned most of the blame for this crushing defeat. Isom accuses previous historians of treating Admiral Nagumo and his staff as "stupid" and "incompetent" -- a wild exaggeration. He then relies almost totally on the postwar interrogations and memoirs of these officers who had good reasons to misremember or fudge the nature and exact times of their actions. Sometimes this requires elaborate rationalizations to explain away conflicts between these sources and contemporary documents.

Like the former law professor he is, Isom defends the 1st Air Fleet's command decisions with every possible argument, including many that show a profound lack of understanding of how WWII navies operated and some that actually impeach the competence of the officers he claims to defend.

For instance, Isom makes several impossible claims about the radio suit of Nagumo's flagship AKAGI. He claims that key intelligence reports transmitted from Tokyo were not received by AKAGI due to her small and badly positioned antennas, and small command island structures. Actually, all the Japanese fleet carriers had antenna arrays almost identical to those of US fleet carriers, supported on tall masts that were folded down only when planes were actually landing or launching. The size of the islands is irrelevant because the main radios of carriers were not located in the island structure, but below the flight deck. And Nagumo's fleet had two CAs and two BBs with normal fixed antennas that could have passed messages on to AKAGI. If the Tokyo broadcasts were really not received by Nagumo, the only possible cause is incompetence by his communication staff. It is more likely they were simply ignored as part of the general overconfidence the IJN had developed during the first 6 months of the war.

It is essential to Isom's model of the battle that the 0728 TONE-4 scout plane report did not reach Nagumo until about 0800. So he claims that "AKAGI's radio" was not tuned to the scout channel because "it" was monitoring the strike on Midway. This is just plain crazy. Aircraft carriers had multiple receivers and radiomen to monitor all relevant channels. No competent battle staff would rely on vital tactical radio messages being relayed by flag or blinker from TONE as Isom claims.

Isom even attempts to justify Nagumo's grossly inadequate air search plan with a variety of misleading statements and fudges. It is easy to show from the chart in the book that all likely locations of US vessels were not searched until about 0845 and that Nagumo should not under any circumstance have disarmed his 2nd-wave torpedo planes before then.

In summary, this book is a defense lawyer's brief and not a work of objective history. Since all the "new" issues raised by this author were discussed more carefully by Parshall and Tully in "Shattered Sword" (2005), I strongly suggest that you buy that book instead.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Very detailed, highly researched, must-have but flawed book, February 11, 2008

By 

Bruno "Bruno" (Florida, USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Midway Inquest: Why the Japanese Lost the Battle of Midway (Twentieth-Century Battles) (Hardcover)

This book is written in the form of a legal inquest to find out what happened. The author is to be commended for his massive research, inclusion of detail, and attempt to break down just what went wrong on the Japanese carriers minute by minute.

The problem is that while he purports to be just searching for the truth in the facts, my impression is that this was written from the point of view of Admiral Nagumo's defense attorney, not an objective court.

The author does a great service explaining the time-consuming process of rearming Kate Torpedo bombers, but I thought he jumped through a lot of hoops along the way to exonerate Nagumo.

I agree with the other reviwer that "shattered sword" gave me a much better and easier to understand picture of how Japanese carriers operated, along with much of the same material on their doctrine. I also tend to agree with their conclusion that it was mostly over-confidence ("victory disease") from a string of endless victories and their belief that they would have to enduce the Americans to fight, rather than realizing that the Americans might bring the fight to them.

I also really did not care for the extensive wargaming and "what if" scenarios the author went off on at the end. Carrier warfare cannot be predicted that accurately. I also disagree that the Kate Torpedo bomber was the real "ship killer" in the war, especially when used against carriers. They were more vulnerable, hit a little less often, and while better at sinking a ship, they were probably less useful for quickly putting a carrier out of action by messing up the deck. Their explosive force damaged the ship deep down, and often did not even bother planes on deck or in the hangers. That was the really vulnerable area for a carrier. He's right they could sink ships well, but his own argument for how they were slow to rearm and less versatile defeats his argument that they were the preferred weapon for use against enemy carriers.

I would also point out that in these books that purport to show how the Americans were not outnumbered, they tend to minimize the fact that a huge proportion of the US planes were virtually worthless (Devastator and their faulty torpedos, jury rigged B-26's with the same torps, high level B-17's that rarely hit anything, obsolete buffalo fighters and vindicator bombers) and that when you subtracted them the Japanese definitely had a quality and quantity advantage that they squandered.

The real Japanese errors I noticed were:

1. A weak search plan. Even if not 2-phase, it should have been thicker and overlapping. In carrier warfare finding the enemy first is paramount. Totally the result of overconfidence.

2. Nagumo failed to use his number one advantage, the range of his planes vs American ones. He could deliver escorted attacks at longer range than the Americans could deliver unescorted ones, and far longer than the ranges at which they could deliver escorted attacks with both dive bombers and torpedo planes. Attacking Midway at medium range invited a response by all their bombers that he didn't have to risk, and not conducting a long range search BEFORE the attack was a mistake. Better to not catch Midway's planes on the ground than to have half your force away when you spot US carriers unexpectedly. Also, Japanese forces continually moved TOWARD US forces, which again negated much of their range advantage.

3. Not obeying orders to hold back torpedo armed Kates in case US carriers showed up. Just inexcuseable. But worse, why use any Kates at all against midway? They were certainly less accurate against point targets, and anyone knows cratering sand airfields is pointless.

4. Using planes from all four carriers in the Midway raid. This tied up all his carriers landing returning planes when they could have instead launched two deckloads from 2 carriers and had the same effective force in the raid, reserving the other two for CAP and ship strike reserve.

5. Insisting on strict doctrinal combined arms attacks rather than launching what could be launched as soon as possible. "Perfect is the enemy of good", they say.

6. Over-commitment of Zeros to CAP duty and poor fighter control. The over-kill against the US Torpedo planes shows that too many Zeros were attacking and none were kept in reserve. This is the very essense of the duty of the commanding Admiral, to make sure his people know to keep enough fighter planes properly disposed to counter the dive bomber threat he KNEW was bound to be coming soon.

This is a useful addition to one's library on the subject, but I feel it could have been done in the form of an article and saved the reader a lot of tedium.

39 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars New MIdway revelations with a few arguable conclusions, October 23, 2007

By 

R. W. Russell "midway42.org" (Lodi, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Midway Inquest: Why the Japanese Lost the Battle of Midway (Twentieth-Century Battles) (Hardcover)

Clearly, the Battle of Midway is the most chronicled single event in the U.S. Navy's history. Six decades of books, media productions and scholarly studies on it would seem to have covered every conceivable fact that can possibly be analyzed and reported. At this late date, then, researchers face an intimidating challenge in coming up with anything new as to how and why the battle turned out as it did. Midway Inquest is author Dallas Isom's attempt to do just that, and he largely succeeds.

Isom, a law professor at Willamette University, initially presented his thesis (that Japanese carrier admiral Chuichi Nagumo was befuddled by circumstances largely beyond his control) in 2000 via a detailed treatise in the Naval War College "Review." That article was something of a groundbreaker in Midway historiography, for it included a fresh analysis of certain key evidence coupled with original revelations that brought important new understandings of Nagumo's woes as the battle unfolded. Midway Inquest is the author's NWC article expanded into book form, with abundant supporting data and supplemental text.

The book's subtitle, "Why the Japanese Lost the Battle of Midway," may appear rather simplistic to casual students of the battle, for those facts have long been assumed. But Isom believes that there is much more to the story, and that certain elements of the classic explanation for Japan's defeat at Midway are wrong. He bases his theories on several interviews with Japanese veterans and extensive review of primary documents in Japan. The result is two rather significant findings that Isom brings to the Midway discussion. Number one, his Japanese interviews were focused more on the enlisted mechanics who worked on the carriers' hangar decks than on the pilots who are the usual focus of interviewers. That gave Isom a highly detailed understanding of exactly how, for example, a torpedo was mounted on a B5N2 torpedo bomber ("Kate"), and especially what was involved in removing one, replacing it with a land bomb, and then reversing the procedure. It turns out that such minor details were a very important factor in Nagumo's decision process as the carrier battle commenced, which leads the reader to a far better understanding of why the admiral could not get an air strike launched before it was too late.

The second new revelation concerns the renowned flight of the cruiser Tone's number 4 scout plane which, to Nagumo's supreme consternation, reported an American carrier in his vicinity. Tone 4 had launched thirty minutes behind schedule due to mechanical trouble, leading many Midway authors to conclude that Japan would have won the battle if the scout had launched on time. A half hour advance notice that an American carrier was nearby would have given Nagumo a head start in rearming his Kates, with the result that a full strike could have been launched before American dive bombers arrived overhead. But Isom's analysis of Tone 4's track and the time of its contact report over Yorktown reveals an interesting incongruity--it wasn't supposed to be anywhere near the American carriers at that time. Its assigned track should have taken it well to the south and beyond the U.S. fleet's location, with the result that its crew most likely would never have seen any ships at all.

But that didn't happen--Tone 4 spotted the Yorktown at a time it shouldn't have, leaving Isom to conclude that its pilot had decided to make up the lost thirty minutes by shortcutting his assigned track. He apparently turned north to start his dogleg return much sooner than he would have had he launched on time, and thus overflew Yorktown at an unintended time and location. Ironically, then, Tone 4's mechanical problem was the cause for Nagumo having any luck at all in striking the U.S. fleet, rather than the critical failing in Japanese search operations that earlier writings make it out to be.

The book has other desirable features, most notably a chart showing all of Nagumo's scout plane assignments superimposed over the tracks of the opposing fleets. It makes the Tone 4 issue very clear. Other plusses are Isom's supplementary chapters, which give a very good overview of America and Japan's march to war as well as excellent synopses of the post-Midway battles of 1942: Guadalcanal, Eastern Solomons, and Santa Cruz Islands.

However, Midway Inquest suffers from several notable flaws that diminish the book's appeal. Isom comes off as rather elitist in his preface, implying that other Battle of Midway authors are guilty of chauvinism and that a lawyer like him is best able to dispassionately analyze the facts of the battle in an unbiased manner. Professional historians will probably argue that they are as capable as Isom for writing on this subject without prejudice.

Other faults include the author's contention that a main catalyst for the Japanese defeat was a fortuitous error in the initial U.S. scouting report of Nagumo's location, which is only true if you believe the American PBY was absolutely wrong and that Nagumo's report--written long after the battle, with much of his ships' records at the bottom of the Pacific--was absolutely right. Isom gives no reason why we should do that. His suggestion on how the Japanese could have actually taken the atoll focuses exclusively on the carrier battle without considering the critical problems that would have faced the Japanese cruisers conducting the bombardment, as well as the troops that would have waded ashore against daunting defenses about which they had no intelligence. The author makes numerous other claims that historians will find highly arguable.

In fairness, though, such issues are peripheral to the book's central theme and are not a reason to avoid buying it. Indeed, Midway Inquest should be read by everyone embarking on a serious study of the Battle of Midway. Isom has given us something quite rare, a good book about the battle that doesn't simply retell it. Its subject matter is new, important, and very well presented despite the occasional flaw.