The Battle of
Midway Roundtable
Warrant
Officer Tom Cheek escorts Torpedo Squadron 3 at the Battle of Midway,
4
June 1942. Original artwork by John
Greaves, http://www.johngreavesart.ca/
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THE ROUNDTABLE FORUM
Official
newsletter of the Battle of Midway Roundtable
"To
promote awareness and understanding of the great battle
and to honor
the men who fought and won it."
20 November 2009
Issue Number: 2009-45
Our 13th Year
~ AROUND THE TABLE ~
MEMBERS’
TOPICS IN THIS ISSUE:
1. Marine SBDs Over Midway
2. B-17s at Midway
3. VT-8 Logbook
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1. MARINE SBDs OVER MIDWAY ( see issue #44 )
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13 November
2009
From: William Reece
North
Carolina
The LIFE photo has interested me ever since I first saw it. These color shots are just pure gold. Note the damage on the right side of the leading edge of the cowling of aircraft #5. That same debris appears on the horizontal stabilizer of #5 in a shot later in the set so it can't be a flaw in the negative. Could the debris and the cowl damage be from a bird strike? A Midway albatross perhaps?
I count eight SBDs in the photo. Did we ever discover the unit?
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13 November
2009
From: Paul Faulkner
New York
I really enjoyed the
latest issue. As to my favorite
color photos of the Marine SBDs from Midway, if you look very closely, there
are actually eight, not seven SBDs. Check
below and to the port side of aircraft #7 to see the tail of one more SBD.
As to the debris on the
tail of #5, it's hard to say. Note the
damage to the cowl ring of this aircraft also.
Could it be the remains of one of Midway's famous "Gooney Birds"
after a bird strike?
I'd still like to believe
these photos are from VMSB-241's one practice flight prior to the battle. None of the contrary evidence I've heard
seems convincing to me.
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12 November
2009
From: Bill Aicklen
Georgia
I love those Life pictures of
the SBD. I use them as wallpaper on my
laptop! Now, I wish I could figure out
how to reproduce the surface color fading when I build my models of USN Pacific
aircraft.
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Ed. note: I’m sure there’s a scale model expert on
the Roundtable who can answer Bill’s question about color fading. Contact him directly as shown in your new
issue announcement.
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2. B-17s at MIDWAY ( see issue #44 )
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13 November
2009
From: Don Boyer
Hawaii
In
response to James Sontag's question, I think we don't hear much about what the
B-17s did because they didn't accomplish anything of note during the
battle, and the photos they took at the time substantiate this view.
In
the usual fashion of high-altitude bombers, seeing a burst of smoke or something
from a ship after dumping a load of bombs counted as a hit. It probably never occurred to the crews
that bombs dropping in the vicinity of aircraft carriers tends to make them
open the throttles to the max, generating big black clouds of stack smoke.
A
former B-17 pilot here in Hawaii said there was a heck of a lot of bragging at
the officers’ club to the effect that the B-17 flyboys had done wonders at
Midway. The gas-bagging even got to Admiral Nimitz, who let the whole
thing slide without trying to correct the record and thereby earn the ill-will
of the Army Air Forces, who were hard enough to get along with as it was with
the usual inter-service rivalries.
So AAF coverage at the Battle of Midway often gets slighted and kept to the bare bones. We don't hear about the long hours in the air and the excitement of the bomb runs because they flew out there, dumped their bombs, hit nothing and came home. Even the bomber crews themselves probably don't want a book written on that one, although I emphasize that their results were not due to any lack of trying. The technique just wasn’t good enough against high-speed vessels free to maneuver, and had nothing at all to do with the competence or bravery of the men involved.
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13 November
2009
From: David Luck
Southern
California
Throughout WW2 the AAF was
bucking hard for a separate service designation, via a "unique strategic
mission" performed by long-range bombers. This led to a lot of overclaiming in all theatres. Post-Midway, the Bomber Barons claimed
multiple hits and sinkings of Japanese carriers, none of which actually
happened. So, partly in reaction to
this sort of thing, there has been some post-war tendency to underrate the B-17
crews' contribution to the battle's outcome.
Actually, the high-altitude attack early on June 4th was fairly
accurate, and the strike photos show Japanese carrier captains having to
whip their ships into tight circles and violent S-turns to avoid being
hit. This in turn helped fixate
Nagumo's mind on the air threat from Midway.
The previous day's
B-17 attack on Tanaka's Midway invasion flotilla may also have been better
than previously thought. Captain Hara,
aboard destroyer Amatsukaze, gives it bad marks, saying in his book
that bombs missed by 1000 meters. But
there is a Japanese diary, newly added to Marine veteran Rube Garrett's Guadalcanal site, by Genjirou
Inui, who has a different account. As a member of Col. Ichiki's
detachment, he was aboard one of the troop-transports headed for Midway and saw
a nearby ship, Argentina Maru, straddled by near misses. Not bad from 20,000 feet.
There's a
few other BOM items of interest in this eyewitness account, and Roundtable
members might want to check it out.
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3. VT-8 LOGBOOK
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6 November
2009
From: Wilson O’Neal
Washington
state
I recently acquired a flight log book that belonged to Frank Carneiro,
who was an AOM 3/c in VT-8. He was sent
to radioman school a week before the battle, which basically saved his
life. He probably would have flown with
Harold Ellison if he had been present.
Here is a link with a picture of Carneiro and Ellison next to a
Devastator sometime prior to the battle.
http://www.usshjellisondd864.org/haroldjellison.html
Carneiro rejoined VT-8 in mid-June of 1942, just two weeks after the
battle. He flew with them all through
the Guadalcanal campaign until the squadron was disbanded. He went on to fly with VC-18 in Avengers and
then with VPB-121 in Privateers throughout the war. The last entry in the log book is August 3, 1945 on Tinian, just
three days before the Enola Gay flies its historic mission.
The first entries
in the log book are in March of 1942.
Carneiro has eight flights with George Gay. You can see in the attached
photos the other members of the squadron, most of who were killed at Midway. I would be glad to scan more photos if you
wish.
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Ed. note: I didn’t post the sample images
that Wilson attached with his message, but anyone interested in seeing the
Carneiro flight log can contact him directly as shown in your new issue
announcement.
~ NOW HEAR THIS! ~
NEWS
& INFO IN THIS ISSUE:
- Book Review: Mercer’s “Miracle”
- Link of the Week
- Editor’s Notes
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BOOK REVIEW: MERCER’S “MIRACLE”
Miracle at Midway, by Charles E. Mercer (1977)
First off, it’s necessary to point out that this is not
Gordon Prange’s renowned Miracle at Midway that was published in 1982
and which became the number one best seller of all BOM books. Somehow, Prange was either unaware of that
title on an earlier work, or he deliberately purloined it because he thought
nothing else would do for the Midway masterpiece that he had in mind. In either case, Mercer’s book was first with
a title that would become an iconic symbolism of the battle.
Besides the title duplication, there seems to be another
oddity about this book. It was first
brought to my attention years ago when we first started putting together a
reference list on the Roundtable. Someone—and
I wish I could remember who—told me that Mercer’s book was originally published
in 1942, with a copyright renewal in 1977.
I’d found that very interesting because hardly anything of substance
about the BOM had been declassified by the end of 1942, so a book written about
it then would have been sketchy at best, but still highly interesting due to
its vintage. I listed it that way on
the Midway Library page on
our web site, with an invitation for someone to send us a review.
That’s the way things stood for years, until Barrett
Tillman found a copy of the 1977 edition and sent it to me. After a thorough read plus a little Internet
research, I’ve concluded that the 1942 version never existed. The 1977 book makes no mention of an earlier
version, and on-line booksellers refer to it as a “first edition.” So unless some new evidence surfaces, it
seems that a 1942 edition never happened.
Such would be highly unlikely in any case.
So, back to the book in hand: it runs 160 pages and
includes a collection of familiar photos.
Mercer is said to have been an intelligence officer during WW2, who
became a prolific writer and publishing house editor in his postwar
career. His brief biography on the book’s
jacket doesn’t say if he was in Army or Navy intel; my guess would be Army
since he gets shipboard terminology wrong in a couple places.
The book is a very easy read, which explains why some
booksellers list it among juvenile literature.
As for its historical quality, there isn’t much a 160-page book on the
BOM written over 30 years ago is going to reveal to us today, but it does have
a few attractions. The first half of
the book is a good synopsis of Pearl Harbor and Coral Sea plus the runup to the
war; topics not always covered very well in other BOM works. Then, it seems that Mercer’s research made
him privy to a few interesting tidbits of insight that I haven’t seen
before. He mentions VMF-221 pilots on
Midway calling their old F4F-3s “Wilbur Wrights” instead of Wildcats, and he
talks about the Enterprise pilots’ habit of never shaving before going
into battle, saving that as a ritual carried out only after victory. The meticulously groomed Spruance reportedly
joined his pilots in that tradition on the morning of June 4th.
Mercer also comes up with an insightful analysis of the
precarious position Fletcher and Spruance found themselves when preparing their
task forces for battle. He says that,
mindful of the need to preserve their carriers more than Midway itself, the two
admirals faced a three-horned dilemma.
They’d be publicly castigated if the atoll fell at the expense of saving
their ships. On the other hand, if
Midway is saved but the carriers are lost, they’d have violated CINCPAC’s principle
that the carriers were more important.
And worse, if the enemy took Midway and sunk our carriers in the
process, their names would go down in infamy as the commanders who lost
everything in the most vital battle of the Pacific war.
As you might expect, a book of this vintage has an
assortment of historical errors that will cause raised eyebrows for just about
any Roundtable reader. Mercer claims
that U.S. intel forces had broken the chief Japanese naval codes prior to Pearl
Harbor, which would delight the “FDR knew” crowd. He says Pearl Harbor was the first use of a carrier in combat,
which would surprise the Royal Navy vets who bombed Taranto and ran down the Bismarck. He has Fletcher in command of the Yorktown
at Coral Sea. He has Best and his two
wingmen diving on Kaga. He has a
floating George Gay in visual range of the damaged Hiryu. And incredibly, he
has “a swarm of Zekes” bagging all six of Thach’s VF-3 fighters.
But on balance, I’d say the book’s unexpected plusses
manage to overcome its minuses, most of which were not unexpected. High on the list of good points is Mercer’s
mention of the intel annex to CINCPAC’s Op-Plan 29-42. The basic op-plan for Midway was made public
long ago, but to my knowledge, Annex B, the special intelligence report to the
task force commanders, has never been found.
Mercer briefly describes it as a detailed analysis of each of the ships
likely to comprise the enemy force.
That brief comment is more than we (or at least, I) ever knew concerning
the illusive Annex B.
Used copies of Mercer’s Miracle are available on
Amazon for less than a dollar (plus shipping).
I can recommend it to anyone who likes to maintain a complete collection
of BOM references. By no means is it any
sort of stellar work on the battle, but it is unique enough on various levels
to have a place in anyone’s Midway library.
—RR
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LINK OF THE WEEK
This week’s link is a
dazzling painting of Dick Best’s attack on Akagi, by artist Tom
Freeman. Although an impressive
rendition of one of the battle’s most important occurrences, there are a couple
points of detail that are vulnerable to correction. Does anyone care to tell us what they are?
Click here for
the link of the week.
Thanks to William Shields for sending us the link.
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EDITOR’S NOTES
~ I mentioned above that FDR conspiracy zealots would delight in Charles
Mercer’s assertion that the U.S. was reading the main Japanese naval codes
before Pearl Harbor. However, their
delight would have been short-lived.
Later in the book, Mercer trounces the “FDR knew” myth by pointing out
the insanity of any notion that the president would risk sacrificing the bulk
of his navy in the Pacific in order to start a war in the Atlantic.
~ Here’s a salute to long time Roundtable member Dick Brown, a
CTF-17 staff radioman at the BOM, who was elected president of the USS Yorktown
CV-5 Club for the current year. The
association has been solidly supported by Yorktown veterans over the
years, and was a major presence during the 65th anniversary of D-Day
commemoration at the WW2 museum in New Orleans last June.
~ We won’t have a new issue next
week because of the Thanksgiving holiday.
The next issue is scheduled for Friday, December 2nd.
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