Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway

 by Bob Cheeks  

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Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully have made a major contribution in examining the characteristics of a people embarked on a course of self-destruction.

Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway
By Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully
Potomac Books, Inc.
Dulles, Virginia
Hdbk, 613 pgs., photos, index, maps, diagrams, bibliographical reference
ISBN: 1-57488-923-0

THANK GOD, I HAVE DONE MY DUTY.
– Admiral Horatio Nelson, At the Battle of Trafalgar, Oct. 21, 1805

It is a large, heavy book, so impressive in appearance it reminds one of those ponderous, multi-colored tomes that rested on many a living room “coffee” table during the capricious American bourgeois era several decades ago. It requires two hands to lift its six hundred pages and it is filled to overflowing with an exegetical analysis that will thrill, delight, and satisfy any student of military history.

It is history, par excellence!

So well written is Shattered Sword, that its authors, Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, must surely be aware of the “Past-history” distinction made by British philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Both gentlemen indicate an abiding desire to eschew the “accepted” wisdom of the battle of Midway (the “What really happened”) and embrace the Oakeshottian axiom of interpreting “what the evidence obliges us to believe.”

In so doing, Parshall and Tully have revealed themselves to be an anomaly, that rare breed, real historians. The presentation of the battle is done in the narrative avoiding a dry, moribund recitation open to the infections of prejudice or a specious empiricism. The day of the battle is broken down to the hour, and when necessary to the minute in order to facilitate the reader's understanding.

Parshall and Tully have examined this battle from the top of the castle; they have cast their eyes over a wide expansion of the Pacific and given their readers a specific mode of experience (history) for a specific event. Their book is coherence without certainty, for certainty in matters of historicity is inherently a lie camouflaged by contradiction.

It is the authors’ probity, oft stated in their admonishment that additional research may alter their version of causation or events, that lifts the book above the common. Such histories are rare, such histories reveal a sense of the “past,” and they are to be acknowledged and treasured.

It is the authors’ painstaking examination of Japanese primary sources that has required them to tell a very different story than the one that has been prescribed by positivistic historians over the past sixty-four years. To reveal their hard earned findings would be unfair, but if you would like to know…

– What was the root cause of the Japanese Imperial Navy’s (JIN) failure at Midway?

– Was the JIN infected with “victory disease?”

– Did Nagumo’s carrier task force “far outnumber” Admiral Nimitz’s forces at “the point of contact?”

– What effect did the Japanese victory over the Russian Imperial Fleet at Tsushima in 1905 have on the Battle of Midway?

– What were the American forces' failures at Midway?

– What were the fundamental design flaws of the JIN’s carriers?

…then you must read Shattered Sword!

Not only do the authors provide a well written and accurate rendering of this pivotal engagement, primarily from the Japanese perspective, their thoughtful and cogent analysis in the final chapters — "Why Did Japan Lose," "Assessing the Battle’s Importance," and "The Myths and Mythmakers of Midway" — stands apart a significant contribution not only to the Battle of Midway but for the entire Pacific Theatre as well. And that coupled with their knowledge of the various technologies and tactics related to Japanese carriers, aircraft, and surface vessels makes Shattered Sword the most detailed and erudite naval warfare history I’ve ever read.

The authors of Shattered Sword exemplify Michael Oakeshott’s definition of those who prowl the dank and dusty labyrinth of the past: “But for the 'historian,' Oakeshott wrote, “for whom the past is dead and irreproachable, the past is feminine. He loves it as a mistress of whom he never tires and whom he never expects to talk sense.”

Parshall and Tully have explored Japanese naval culture circa June 1942. They have mined the philosophical conditions and characteristics of a people embarked on a course of self-destruction, and in so doing they have contributed a major work to the art of history.

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