History Buffs: Midway Part One

This episode is sponsored by Curiosity Stream, which now comes free with nebula details in the description box below. Hello and welcome

history

lovers. My name is Nick Hodges and after months of effort, I'm happy to present to you my lengthy waiter's review of the movie halfway through. Thank you all very much for your patience and without further ado let's begin on December 7, 1941, a date that will live in infamy. The day Roosevelt gave this speech to Congress was the day Americans learned that they could no longer sit on the sidelines. The world became that way again. In conflict and now not even they were safe Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was just the beginning of a rapid succession Expanded rapidly and violently across Asia and the Pacific Their empire would soon encompass more than a fifth of the world's surface and there seemed to be little to slow it down, the film takes place halfway through the first six months of the United States' entry into the war, when they were at a disadvantage against a fanatical, battle-hardened enemy that outnumbered them in aircraft carriers and experienced pilots.

However, even Japan knew the navy. The dominion would last forever. The United States was frantically building new aircraft carriers for its fleets, but that would take time until then. It was vulnerable, so Japan hoped to lure the few valuable American carriers into a trap by launching an all-out assault on the island

midway

through the battle. What followed would be one of the most crucial turning moments of World War II and what I will do in this episode is find out how accurate this film is, does it strive to portray these events as they happened or as they will happen in Hollywood? once again he exaggerates his hand by preferring creative license to historical realism or one way or another we will find out in this review this is halfway there it was a quiet sunday morning on the island of oahu hawaii the skies were clear the ocean was warm to For the average American, life was good in this tropical paradise, they spent the day only with the worries of civilian and military life in peacetime, their jobs, their families planned the rest of the weekend to go out dancing and go to the movies. , all was well in the world except that it was not before this morning that they stopped from time to time to catch the latest news from abroad, much of it grim. hitler's armies had invaded europe and were engaged in a battle outside the very gates of moscow his african corps and a huge italian army were besieging the british at brook and we are close to the egyptian border the north atlantic was plagued by submarines that had sunk millions of tons of allied ships and the stories of japanese atrocities that Leaking out of China were so shocking they could hardly be believed, but in the end, these were all foreign wars being fought thousands of miles away with little to do with the United States.

To them, these were times of peace blessed by two oceans on each side with non-predatory neighbors to the north and south, Americans had the luxury of feeling safe. In the face of the world's problems, this attitude was the same in Hawaii, where they had no neighbors for thousands of miles, where they felt that nothing could touch them. The sailors were stunned by what they were seeing. Japanese fighters and bombers flew unopposed in American skies and strafed their ships. at will they breached their decks with machine guns and cannons, those who could die for cover this only offered temporary respite, their fully berthed and anchored battleships presented the perfect targets, carefully lined up, the Japanese bombers scored multiple hits and somehow even They found a way. to launch torpedoes into the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor, a feat thought impossible just moments before soon the pride of the U.S.

Pacific Fleet was engulfed in smoke and fire and then, above them, high-level Japanese bombers flew over and dropped their cargo, one of them. She crashed into the belly of the USS Arizona and detonated the ammunition store. The force of the explosion was so intense that it split the ship in half. Outside of the chaos unfolding in the line of battleships, the Americans could only watch in horror as they realized the world war they attempted. desperately to avoid had reached them um in almost six months Japan will control an area three times the size of Europe and the United States combined easily eclipsing the territorial gains of its Axis ally, Nazi Germany, by crippling the Pacific Fleet of the USA, the Japanese had free reign. throughout the region not even the royal navy was in a position to help three days after Pearl Harbor, the British sent two capital ships to protect Singapore from rejection and one of the most advanced battleships of the time, the Prince of Wales, which It housed a formidable formation. of anti-aircraft weapons also thought that within two hours both were sunk by japanese bombers from indochina this disaster demonstrated once and for all that battleships were no longer the main weapons system of a modern navy after the fall of singapore the british fleet of the This was completely withdrawn from the Pacific and relocated to present-day Sri Lanka, but even four thousand miles away, in the Indian Ocean, the Japanese still posed a threat on March 31, 1942, the same force that attacked Pearl Harbor. he assaulted Colombo in exchange for the price of losing.

With only 47 aircraft they were able to sink two heavy cruisers, an aircraft carrier, a destroyer and a corvette along with 47 merchant ships, one of the main pilots of the attack, Mitsuha Fuchita himself wrote: "who controls the air, controls the sea and the world "Conventional navy ships do not stand a chance against air power. It is sad to see them sinking so helplessly in this regard. Britain no longer dominated the waves. Japan had more modern ships. Highly sophisticated aircraft and better trained pilots. There was only one navy left in the entire world that could challenge. them and that was the United States, although their Pacific fleet had been badly hit at Pearl Harbor by a stroke of luck, three of their aircraft carriers stationed there were at sea, so before the United States could retaliate, it was necessary take them out.

Japan hoped to do this at once. decisive naval battle on their own trafalgar, so to speak, when they would hold all the cards and force the Americans to negotiate on their terms, but still they really thought that such a battle could stop a giant nation with almost infinite resources and millions of men . At your disposal the short answer is yes, you know why, because they have done it before. Let's turn the clocks back to 1904, when Japan was just a rising power, flexing its muscles on the world stage. Their first imperial ambitions put them at odds with the Russian Empire.

The Russians wanted a warm-water port for their Pacific fleet since the one they had in Vladivostok, Siberia, was closed during the winter months, so the port was liberated from China on the peninsula. from liaodong called port arthur this pacific fleet posed a threat to the movement of japanese troops in asia and negotiations broke down when the russians demanded that korea north of the 39th parallel serve as a neutral zone korea at that time was under the sphere of influence of japan on 9 february 1904 the japanese staged a surprise attack on port arthur with torpedoes and ensured that their formal war decoration did not reach the russian heads of state until several hours after the attack, just as they would at pearl Harbor almost 40 years later, when they attacked at midnight?

They torpedoed Zarvitch Retzevan. They are monkeys without The declaration of war detracted from all diplomatic avenues, although the initial attack on Port Arthur

part

ially failed. The Russian Pacific Fleet was blocked for months and failed to escape in May. Japanese troops landed and laid siege to the port. The Russian garrison desperately needed to be relieved. but the only help zarnicalist ii could send was the baltic fleet. He would have to sail 18,000 miles around the world, but by the time he reached the South China Sea in May 1905, Port Arthur had long since fallen, so the Baltic Fleet's new objective was to sail to Vladivostok the shortest route.

It would take them through the Tsushima Strait where the Japanese were waiting for them with an ambush. In a very short time, practically the entire Baltic Fleet was annihilated. Of the 27 warships sent, only three made it to Vladivostok. At this point, the Russians were unable to continue the war. after losing their Pacific and Baltic fleets, which left them no choice but to sue for peace. The agreement was mediated by American President Theodore Roosevelt in New Hampshire in 1905. It would become known as the Treaty of Portsmouth and ended largely in favor of Japan. They eventually gained control of Port Arthur.

Korea and South Manchuria. The Russians even gave up half. south of Zakalin Island the Japanese demonstrated to the world that not only were they bound to be reckoned with but that their small island nation could even defeat the enormous Russian Empire. Due to this, the militarists and ultra-nationalists within the Japanese government felt emboldened by their success and, over the decades, were able to slowly accumulate absolute and unchecked power, so almost 40 years later you will want to go to war. with another giant, the united states of america, and the feeling in japan was that if they could do it once they could do it again, everyone knows something big is coming, we're talking about a couple of dozen plans against an entire japanese fleet and If we lose, they own the Pacific and attack the west coast Seattle San Francisco Los Angeles burns after the attack on Pearl the mood in the US Navy was gloomy they had always seen battleships as their main attack weapon and yet All of the Pacific Fleet have been sunk or critically damaged.

Efforts were being made to recover them, as well as the other warships, since Pearl Harbor had a shallow harbor, but for these sailors the place to see these great symbols of American power crushed so easily on the first day of the war must have been humiliated as if someone had taken the rule book of naval warfare, the rules that everyone thought they understood, and simply tossed them into the air, the dawn of a The new era was here and the United States had fallen dangerously behind its new enemy. Because of this, there was an element of defeatism within the upper ranks of the US military about what to do next.

The situation in the Pacific is much worse than previously thought. has reported we have three aircraft carriers the jabs have ten we do not have functional battleships they have nine they have more cruisers more bombers more fighters and much of their equipment is more modern, we will only have to rely on the men we have out there to hold the line. I don't envy the new commander, it's me, isn't he taking command over what's left? the pacific fleet was admiral chester nimitz, chosen by the president himself, he was one of the few officers that roosevelt trusted to be honest and not hide anything, but roosevelt also knew that he could trust emmett to do more than just To hold the line as some of his admirals in Washington advised him that his position was to protect the few remaining warships in the United States and wait long enough for their wartime production to begin, but for Roosevelt this was unacceptable, it made him The West seemed weak and would hardly inspire confidence in its allies, so at Christmas time 1941 Roosevelt Sun limits Pearl Harbor and tells it not to return until the war is won, a daunting task to say the least, as bad things kept coming. news of the Japanese advance on all fronts.

The dojo took over Hong Kong when Nimitz arrived in Pearl. Port morale among the troops was no higher. His first job was to invigorate the men, increase their confidence and focus them on the fight to come, and to his credit he was able to do this without needing to shout or look for people to blame. and fire for not seeing that sneak attack coming, he knew that everyone was already in shock, so his approach was to assure them that they were all in this together and that the best thing they could do now was to get back out, we need .

Throwing a punch not only to boost morale but to let the Japanese know what it feels like to be punched, so on February 1, 1942, Admiral Nimitz ordered the US Navy's first counteroffensive and sent the fleet to the Marshall Islands. and gilbert in the central pacific where the japanese had officially built their naval garrisons, the mission was to deny the enemy a forward operating base to possibly invade hawaii. This would later be done by destroying the airfields' fuel storage tanks and any of their ships, the Americans could hopefully find success. The raid could also draw Japanese forces away from other fronts, but I thinkIt's fair to say that Nimitz also wanted to give his men a baptism through fire.

This raid would provide invaluable combat experience, such as what the Japanese capabilities were, how they fought, but most importantly. would highlight American strengths and weaknesses that needed to be learned now and not later. One of the biggest scandals in the early days of the war was the dismal performance of American torpedoes. Nine times out of ten they went off course, they failed too much. to detonate or detonate too early it was until late 1943 before these defects were found and fixed, meaning that the very tactics that torpedo boat pilots were trained in were dangerously defective torpedoes, they sink ships, not bombs, and my men need a screen, even if you get close enough, your torpedoes don't work, that's a room, yeah, it's a rumor because those damn things have never been tested.

He's not exaggerating about how the Bureau of Ordnance, a powerful de

part

ment of the US Navy, never did live-fire testing because they decided torpedoes were too expensive to test. I think they won in 1926 against a decommissioned submarine that scored a miss and a hit, but that was basically the only test they did after that was in simulations with practice torpedoes that could be used over and over again and because of the same budget constraints than the pilots. and the submariners were never allowed to train with real torpedoes, it was only until actual combat that these defects were discovered, but when they were first reported to Washington, they were fired, the ordinance office insisted that the problem was not in their torpedoes but that their navy kids couldn't shoot clear, which is outrageously arrogant if you ask me, especially when you consider what these guys were ordered to do to make an impact.

The torpedo squadrons had to fly low to the waterline at a very slow speed, just above the wings, stalling, making them vulnerable to not only anti-aircraft fire but enemy fighters. It took nerves of steel to do this just to risking their lives for torpedoes that didn't work most of the time exposing a serious weakness in American naval strategy fortunately things went much better now for the dive bombers. Their tactics were completely different: they would start at about 20,000 feet when the target was little more than a speck on the ground, and then, at an 80-degree angle, they would hurtle towards the earth at 275 miles per hour because the plane's hood is is left open to prevent things from fogging up, the wind blows into the cabin making the descent extremely loud and jarring with a burst of flak exploding around them and all of this happens while they concentrate on maintaining their fixed target. its range and waiting until the last possible minute before releasing its payload and exiting the dive at the end, the Marshall Gilbert Islands rate was a moderate success, causing no significant damage against the Imperial Japanese Navy, but it did boost a lot His necessary morale that Nimitz was looking for also gave the Japanese pause for thought: they underestimated the United States' ability to regroup so quickly after the pearl and assumed that they would not dare risk losing any more ships in the coming months, except to provoke the Japanese.

A Major Confrontation Ahead Nimitz needed to accomplish something much bigger than attacking a few atolls, something that would really get his attention. In April 1942, Nimitz sent the Enterprise and a task force on a top-secret mission across the North Pacific to steam. In complete radio silence, the crews had no idea where they were going, then on the horizon they saw another American aircraft carrier, the Hornet, but curiously on its deck there were no navy planes, but 16 army B-25 bombers led by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle. Their goal was to take off from the aircraft carrier something these planes were not designed to do to fly to Japan and bomb Tokyo itself, although this would be a one way trip because they would then divert and land in unoccupied China, now they were originally supposed to take off. 400 miles from Japan, but the task force was detected by enemy fishing boats by radio from the mainland.

The two American carriers were en route so the decision was made to launch immediately, but this now put them 650 miles from Japan, meaning they were not going to have enough fuel to reach China safely, but Even though this was looking more and more like a suicide mission, it was still four hours later Doolittle's planes were flying high over Tokyo dropping their bombs, although the damage was minimal, it was sheer audacity of anger that enraged the Japanese leaders, especially when some of those bombs fell on the grounds of the emperor's palace, that alone was an affront to Japan's national pride, up until that point they were the ones handing it out to everyone else and now the mentality was who.

Do these people think they could do this to us now? One thing I appreciated seeing in this movie, however brief the period after the Doolittle raid was. The story most people know is that the success of the raid was mostly symbolic and meant to be. was more of a morale booster for the US home front and how it made the Japanese realize the threat American aircraft carriers posed to the outside world, but what is not as well known was how the Japanese reacted to the attack, as we see in the movie Doolittle. and most of his men ran out of fuel over China and the decision was made to jump even though they could not be sure if they were over unoccupied China or Japanese-occupied China.

Fortunately, he and his crew are picked up by Chinese gorillas. and assist security in serious risks to Chinese lives and although I can't be sure if Doolittle saw for himself what happened next, I think it was appropriate for the film to show that there are no facilities here what is their goal people are talking people people and we just make it worse now, it is always tragic every time civilians die in a bombing, a Japanese civilian certainly did not do little even though he did everything possible to hit only military objectives, but in exchange for the price of losing 50 civilians and endanger the life of the emperor.

Japan's measured response was to eliminate 250,000 Chinese civilians as punishment for helping the Americans. That's the kind of enemy the allies were fighting against. As the summer of 1942 approached, the Japanese conquest of the Pacific began to invade Australia and many feared that a possible invasion was on the way as they attacked northern Australia with an air raid in February using four of their aircraft carriers, launching 188 aircraft. against darwin's harbor causing great damage they achieved complete surprise as this was the first time in modern australia's

history

that they came under attack from a foreign power and this could not have come at a worse time as the majority of their armies They were fighting overseas against Nazi Germany and Italy, leaving only 10,000 soldiers to defend Australia.

The only natural barrier against a possible invasion was the island. of New Guinea, which was less than 100 miles away, but much of it had already been conquered and since the Doolittle Raid two weeks earlier, the Japanese intensified their expansion even further into the Pacific to extend the defense perimeter of the newly formed empire. conquered as they feared. one day australia could be used for a counteroffensive by the allies the japanese are sending their aircraft carriers to the coral sea yes sir they are trying to break our lifeline with australia send a safe message to admiral halsey i want the company to join Yorktown and Lexington in the Coral Sea and telling Halsey the time is a factor now, although the Americans were outnumbered at this point in the war, they had one advantage and that was that they had recently partially broken the Japanese naval codes and we are intercepting enough messages.

To get a rough idea of ​​what their intentions were, in mid-April 1942, Nimitz learned that the Japanese were planning a major offensive and that they were sending three of their aircraft carriers to support a naval invasion of Port Moresby, the last Allied outpost in New Guinea. those carriers were vital, but the problem was that nimitz only had two carriers available, the lexington and yorktown, the other two, the enterprise and the hornet, were still returning from the doolittle raid, they were unlikely to return in time, and so on until May 7, 1942. The American and Japanese fleets clashed head-on in the Coral Sea, just northeast of Australia, and for the first time in history, entirely carrier-based fleets met in combat.

It was also the first naval battle in which none of the rival ships could see each other. Furthermore, all combat took place far over the horizon, with only transport aircraft, all of them engaging in dogfights or conducting bombing raids on enemy ships. The fighting that followed over the next few days was fierce and the Americans sank a Japanese light aircraft carrier. shoho and seriously damaging a fleet aircraft carrier the shokaku burned down and out of commission for her efforts the japanese returned the favor by destroying the lexington and crippling the yorktown 24 hours too late damn why couldn't we have been here?

This leaves us and Hornet. They are the only aircraft carriers in the Pacific for the Japanese, this seemed to them a tactical victory. They emerged from the battle losing fewer ships and had reduced the American carrier force in the Pacific to half its size. They also thought that, unlike the Lexington, the Yorktown had not. She was destroyed, her brave fire crews were able to save her and the Yorktown returned to Pearl Harbor to be repaired. The Americans also stopped the Japanese advance for the first time when the naval invasion of Port Moresby off Australia was saved at least for the moment. but now was not the time to relax as nimitz was informed that another major offensive was on the way according to one of my choral officers c it's just a warm up, he thinks the japanese are planning something much bigger, much bigger, what makes them think. those small fragments that we have intercepted a message about a battleship that is not ready for an upcoming operation request for maps of the Aleutian Islands what is the objective we do not know yet what the Americans did not realize was that the doolittle The rate influenced in the Japanese much more than they appreciated.

One of the Japanese military's greatest weaknesses was the inter-service rivalry between its army and navy. They absolutely hated each other and, of all the major powers in World War II, their relationship was the most dysfunctional: no resources were extracted, no information was shared, things were so bad between the two that they often compromised the effort. of war where the army wanted to go one way and the navy another, to the point that sometimes they didn't even tell each other. another what they were doing, but Doolittle's pace changed everything, briefly uniting them with a common goal of protecting the home islands and destroying the American aircraft carriers. a man whose rallying cry had been that for months he was Admiral Isuroku Yamamoto, the mastermind behind Pearl Harbor, losing the aircraft carrier back then was what he regretted most and since he advocated for resources to take them down, he was now completely determined to do this.

Yamamoto had in his mind a vision of a decisive last naval battle to wipe out the US Pacific Fleet, a vision he probably felt was possible given his past experience, after all, he was a veteran of the Battle of Tsushima Strait which saw the annihilation of the Russian Pacific Fleet and a quick end to that war on Japan's terms, just as in that battle it was to fight. An ambush attacking an American outpost so valuable that Nimitz would send everything he had to protect it. That outpost would be halfway between two small atolls in the central Pacific, large enough to build an air base and close enough to Hawaii. enough to be considered a threat.

Yamamoto's plan was incredibly complex and the reason it was so resisted in Japan was because it required the largest armada the world had ever seen to spread across hundreds of miles of open ocean to avoid detection. would divide into five battle groups to the north. a small task force consisting of two aircraft carriers and troop transports would capture the islands of Kiska and Atu in Alaska. This part of the plan was a compromise with the Japanese military to further expand the northern defense perimeter. It would also mark the first occupation of American soil since the War of 1812.

To the south, the main assault groupSupported by four aircraft carriers it would launch an airstrike

midway

to soften its defences, paving the way for an invasion by a fleet of transport ships carrying 5,000 troops from the Marianas, leading this carrier strike force. Vice Admiral Chiwichi Nagumo was entrusted with what is considered the most powerful naval fleet on the planet, the Kido Bhutai. He had seen action at Pearl Harbor, Darwin Hall and the Coral Sea. Until now he had an almost perfect record at the head of this fleet. fleet and the Japanese high command was confident that it would once again emerge victorious, so once the halfway point was secured, Nagumo's carrier group would join Yamamoto's own battleship fleet and wait for the American carriers to appear and then They would annihilate them with overwhelming force. numbers, except for an offensive as intricately planned as this one, it's strange to think that after the Coral Sea, Yamamoto never questioned what those carriers were doing there, how the Americans knew they were coming.

Code breakers are a rare breed. The Rochefort way of doing things. It's especially particular I don't care if you consult the coffee grounds while you boogie woogie as long as the information is good On May 20, 1942, Captain Joseph Rochefort and his team of cryptographers at Hiccup Station had deciphered radio messages indicating that in two weeks the Japanese would be committing almost their entire fleet to attack a target called AF and he was convinced that this was a mid-course problem. The problem was that naval intelligence in Washington disagreed with Rochefort's theory primarily because it was based on Rochefort recalling a Japanese patrol plane in March. had broadcast that it was passing the target in the central Pacific, this could only be halfway there, however many other intelligence officers were skeptical at this point, the United States only had two functional aircraft carriers left in the Pacific and They were lucky to send them anywhere.

In what sounded like a hunch, what Nimitz needed was concrete proof that AF was halfway there before he could do anything, so a member of Rochefort's team, Jasper Holmes, came up with a ruse. to provoke the Japanese into doing just that. that in washington, they have intercepted several japanese messages stating that the target of their next attack has no fresh water, interesting sir, i heard that halfway there they accidentally sent an unencrypted transmission that their water plant was broken and that their plant water is broken, I don't know, sir, now that all the pieces were coming together, Nimitz had less than two weeks to set his trap.

The element of surprise would be on his side, but that didn't make the challenge any less daunting. Yamamoto's fleet. It was still four times the size of his own and needed all the planes and ships he could get. He was able to find out which is why when Nimitz visited the Yorktown which had been damaged in the Coral Sea, he was told it would take at least two weeks to finish. repairs, to which he replied: "You have three days" and, amazingly, she was seaworthy again within 48 hours with workers still. repairing it as it headed to war, and to even the odds, Nimitz sent nearly a hundred additional fighter planes halfway, turning the island in a sense into its fourth, unsinkable aircraft carrier, by June 2, 1942, the American task force was lying. weight about 300 miles northeast of the halfway point because Rochefort's code-breaking team knew that the Japanese would come from the northwest on June 4, they even knew that their attack would begin after 6 a.m., so that the plan was to wait until the first wave of Japanese bombers.

If radar was detected midway, the Americans would launch all their planes from the island, but instead of using them to attack the bombers, most would bypass the Japanese planes entirely. The idea was to use the island itself to bear the brunt. The enemy attack kept them distracted while the American planes headed straight for their aircraft carriers. The Battle of Midway was about to begin. Well, that concludes the first part of my Midway review. Part two will be uploaded next week, but if you want to see the full review. in its entirety right now available on nebula nebula is a creator-made streaming service where we release content early ad-free and even feature exclusive nebula originals that you can't find anywhere else.

It is also a platform without advertiser restrictions. friendly policies that you would find elsewhere, so basically any videos of mine that need to be heavily edited or disappear will have no problem uploading to Nebula the way they should be viewed, and what's more, Nebula comes free with a curiosity stream which is a subscription streaming service that has nothing but documentaries that include history; in fact, one of my absolute favorites that you can also find there is called apocalypse, world war two and it covers everything you would want to know about that Pearl Harbor conflict. to the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway and is in high definition color.

Also included is a sister series about the WWI apocalypse that I also highly recommend so you can watch thousands of these fantastic documentaries for just 299 a month, but there are also curiosity streams. offered history buff fans a special 26 discount on their annual plan which is only 14.79 instead of the full price they have for everyone else, so if you want to check out the full review halfway through now same, visit Curiousstream.com.