Sea Control - Sea Control 352 - The Silver Waterfall: The Battle of Midway with Brendan Simms and Steven McGregor

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

Links1. "The Silver Waterfall: How America Won the War in the Pacific at Midway," by Brendan Simms and Steven McGregor, PublicAffairs, May 17, 2022.2. "The Importance of the Battle of Midway," by Tom Hone, War on the Rocks, September 12, 2013.3. Battle of Midway - Naval History and Heritage Command.4. Steven McGregor website.5. Brendan Simms faculty profile.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Dr. Ed Salo is taking his first turn in the hosting chair today. And since we've just celebrated the anniversary of the Battle of Midway, he has the authors of The Silver Waterfall, How America Won the War in the Pacific, and Midway on Board. We are still looking for additional audio editors. We're happy to provide you some very basic training materials and instruction in a low-stress environment. So if you're interested in finding a way to contribute to SimSec and add to your resume and personal skill set, please send us an email with your resume to seacontrol at simsec.org. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack,

and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Welcome everyone to Sea Control. My name is Ed Salo and I'm going to be moderating today's podcast. We're excited today to talk to the authors of a new book on the Battle of Midway, The Silver Waterfall, How America Won the War in the Pacific at Midway. And we have with us Brendan Simmons and Stephen McGregor, the authors of the book. Welcome. Hello. Thank you for having us.

Good to be here. So I first wanted to ask you guys, tell us a little about yourselves and your paths to being a historian. I'll let you go first, Brendan. Well, I'm the older of the two of us, which has no merit except that of seniority. So I'll start. So I really became an historian when I discovered about halfway through my undergraduate career as a reading, studying history at Trinity College Dublin, that I was just fascinated by historical causation that I liked working with primary documents, original documents, which I was able to do for my undergraduate dissertation. and if you add to that the fact that my grandfather was also an historian as a second degree you might almost say that it's in the blood

and I guess for myself I started off studying literature English literature and at the Air Force Academy and when I finished that I was in the military for a bit and after after that uh when i went back to university i studied history at cambridge and uh and brendan was my supervisor for that i did a um uh research into american foreign policy during the civil war and uh yeah that was that was how that was how it all began um with history i mean you know you read one book and then you you can't stop you got to read another yeah that's true um well next i was going to kind of get into how you two of you met what you brought up that you had worked together uh how did you decide to work together because you know a lot of times people think of

historians and you know history is you know we work alone but here's a book with two co-authors well i i have a history of co-authoring so i co-authored two books with charlie lederman and the last of which uh on 1941 which was called hitler's american gamble was quite was pretty successful so I'm I'm used to working with a co-author it's people used to warn me that this was something that was not entirely straightforward but my experiences both with Charlie Lederman and now with Steve McGregor here have been completely positive and the reason why I was keen on doing this book together was because I knew Steve obviously as a fine historian, but also because I thought he brought two really critical dimensions to this

book. I mean, this book is not just about war. It's about the nature of America, if you like. It's what Steve calls a piece of Americana. And so having somebody who had actually fought in a war, which Steve has, and I luckily have not, was important to the project, understanding that the nature of of combat and the the emotions and the psychology and secondly having somebody who was american understood the united states um who could relate to to to the this uh story of americana around the book uh was important but but i don't know how steve felt about it it was it was great i mean i i think um i think uh yeah i think i think we both sort of saw different things in the story as well when we went through the materials is we were able to get into the

personal papers of Edward Heinemann the designer of the the Douglas Dauntless which was so critical to the battle and and historians have some historians have known that the Dauntless was important but no one had looked at Heinemann's own work until we had the chance in connection with the battle of midway so it was great to be able to go in and see and see his see his his letters his correspondence and um and brendan and i both sort of different things in the correspondence kind of attracted us and and so it was good that we had kind of both perspectives um to look through his work so that takes me to the question why midway i mean did anyone tell you um you know that subject's already been mined out there's so many books about it why and i also liked how at

the beginning um you brought in the movies which last night i have to admit i started watching the 1970s midway again just to prepare myself for this well obviously midway has been much discussed and there's been a number of really good books on the topic um particularly greg craig simon's book on midway uh there's been also a very good book by uh partial and tully on the japanese side of the battle. So there's no shortage of even quite recent work on Midway. But we felt that there were really three unique angles that we brought to this. One was a wide angle approach at the beginning. So as Steve says, we begin our story with Ed Heinemann, the designer of the battle-winning platform, the Douglas Dauntless. And this is a story around innovation,

around 1920s California, the sort of mix of factors that make for that really kind of dynamic aviation industry. And so the first three chapters are insertions really into the nature of American history, what leads to this culmination. Then we narrow our vision very substantially. And we provide the most granular account of those epic five minutes during which the dive bombers attacked. And then we broaden it out again in the chapter you referred to earlier, Ed, which is the legacy chapter. And we look at what all this meant after the Second World War, but also what it means for today. And I think these approaches are what makes our Midway book different from these other ones.

Not better, but it's simply a different take. Yes, the concept of innovation, I thought, was really, you know, being in the first part of the book, really grabbed me. You know, how do you see innovation helping to win not only the battle, but the war? Well, what's interesting about this is, I think we tend to think of innovation in the Second World War as something that produces revolutionary new technology, like more advanced technology.

You know, we think of something like the atomic bomb. It's almost a kind of, it's a change in the era of technology and in history. but what's interesting about the innovation that's that's so important to the american victory in the battle of midway is that it's it's actually conventional technology um so heinemann heinemann designs the the dauntless but what he does is he designs an incredibly rugged plane it's not necessarily there are some aspects of it which are completely new which other aircraft don't have like like the dive breaks but what what it its main kind of strength is that it's a very durable plane it's a heavy plane in some ways you could say it's over designed but it's a simplistic plane which is able to operate at sea in very difficult conditions and so his innovation in

that sense is that he he's able to take all the existing you know he didn't the other the Japanese dive bomber the he d3a1 that was a very good plane uh the germans had developed a good dive bomber the stuka but what's interesting is that heinemann's plane it could fly further uh it was it was more rugged it was heavier so it could survive um enemy fire um much longer um so he innovated in ways that um they weren't he was using conventional technology um to be an innovator and that was really what allowed um america to win the battle and that's something that you know this aspect of the battle the way that we uh that we uh are able to tell the story that is very that is very unique when you think about the battle of midway okay um give you a couple minutes um you

know a lot of times when people start discussing battle of midway the idea of luck comes in and i saw luck pop up a few times in uh the book give you a couple minutes to discuss the idea of luck and maybe how much it was played out discussing the battle? Well, this is a very common theme in histories of Midway. So really the earliest serious account by Walter Lord called Incredible Victory refers to, he actually uses the phrase, no right to win. You know, he describes the battle as really a concatenation of fortunate circumstances, ultimately, which enabled the American victory.

So there's this idea that it's basically a fluke. It's lucky. Then you've got Gordon Prang's Miracle at Midway, which comes out in the early 1980s, but actually written much earlier in the 70s. um and again there you have the sense of of midway as a deliverance it's something almost you know that comes out of the skies and what we're trying to argue is not that these books are are bad books in fact they still repay a reading today um but we're pushing back against this idea that it's uh it's luck what we're arguing is that it's good training uh good preparation as dusty Kleiss says, who was one of the top dauntless pilots, and he's one of the main foci of our book, says that, you know, they were just that little bit better than the Japanese. And that's

what made all the difference on the day. So it's a story, our story is a story about training, preparation, and skill, and not a story about luck. Yeah, and I think that's all very true. And And I think, you know, when you think about luck in war, I mean, I'd be curious if it comes up when you teach when you teach your military history class. Fortune has always been understood, you know, going back to the ancients, fortune has been understood as, you know, as significant in war. I mean, I think there's a great moment in Roosevelt's Rough Riders where he talks about sitting around the fire and looking at the other men in the Rough Riders and how in just a matter of hours, some of them will be dead. And it's sort of in fortune's hands which ones die and which ones do not. And there is kind of that sense. You do get that sense in war.

And I think it's certainly in the Battle of Midway, there were things that that happened where you think it's it's it's hard to say really why why it went one way and why it went another. But what we discover is that and what we argue in the book is that when when you think about the overall outcome and when you think about the things that were in the control of key players like the American dive bomber pilots, the way they conducted their dive, the place where they put their their ordinance that was in their control and they did perform well, they performed as they trained. so in that sense um while fortune all you know there's always going to be something that fortune um is it's a way that fortune's involved there's there's it you know that doesn't that doesn't mean that you shouldn't train that you shouldn't prepare because you see in the battle of midway you see where it makes a difference and yeah and that brings up to what next thing i had kind of written down to discuss is you say in the book you know you discuss superior training technologies professionals not amateurs won the day um would you like to elaborate on any on that because i

thought that was a really important and you know we think of well i guess not just pilots but you know kind of think of naval personnel as more professionals uh just because you know they're having to deal with really complex machinery and navigation and everything so i i think what we were trying to um uh get out here was that we we tend to think of the second world war as a war which is you know fought badly by professional militaries um during its opening stages and where then uh civilian um genius and mass mobilization wins the day and there's a lot to be said for that approach for for many other uh theaters of the war i mean certainly would be true of the Although the British Army was not as bad between 1939 and 1942, it has been made out and it wasn't as great as people make out after 1942.

Nevertheless, it's true that civilian mobilization, mass mobilization and technological innovation during the war was important. What we were showing was that Midway is different because Midway is actually fought basically by the peacetime U.S. Navy. It's using equipment that, as Steve said, was designed long before the war, like the Dauntless, pilots, all of whom had gained their wings before Pearl Harbor, and ships, aircraft carriers, all of which had been commissioned long before the outbreak of war. So really, it's a victory for the peacetime navy. And the point we're trying to make is that you really then need to have good preparation for war. You can't expect to to make up what you haven't done after the start of hostilities. Yeah, I think that's an excellent point. And I hadn't really thought about that, that, yeah, this was the peacetime Navy. This was the you know, they hadn't had the time to do the huge buildup that you think of with the army that, you know,

I had written in my notes here talking about like Stephen Ambrose celebrating the amateur nature of the U.S. Army, how it was more citizen soldiers who defeated the professional German army. But, yeah, you bring an excellent point up. And that does bring us up to one part, the intelligence. As I was saying, I was watching the 1970s Midway movie last night and the whole focus on how intelligence helped to win the battle. How important do you think the intelligence coups were to winning the battle? Well, I think intelligence undoubtedly played an important role. Going back to the 1920s, the U.S. had managed to crack the Japanese military codes, and that definitely provided a good advantage to the U.S. The U.S. had an advantage in that regard, but that's not our story. We're telling a story that's much more not to take away from the importance of intelligence, but we don't want the intelligence and the focus on intelligence to overshadow other factors which have yet to receive their due,

like the preparation of the pilots, like the skill they implemented on the day, like the importance of the Dauntless as the war-winning machine and like the strategic acumen of Admiral Nimitz. Your narrative is laced with oral histories, memoirs, first-hand accounts, which I found to be very interesting because you decided to focus a lot on the common man and the common man on both sides. Why was this the way you decided to craft the narrative? well we we thought that this was a a very good way in to the story that the reader would need

to identify with a key figure at a at a relatively early stage of our account um and so we introduce in the third chapter uh the character of dusty kleiss who's who's well known uh to aficionados at the battle of midway as as a uh extremely skillful uh dauntless pilot but he also has what's very important is a backstory. There are two backstories which we stress particularly in the lead up to the battle. One is the fact that he's a German-American. So he comes out of that sort of originally immigrant milieu.

And that's a big part of our book is the importance of immigration to American greatness. But also his motives were called into question. He was actually interrogated by U.S. Navy intelligence after Pearl Harbor on account of his German name and background. So it's an interesting counterfactual. You know, had he been taken out of the front line and people like him, what that would have done to the to the U.S. Navy and other formations. But the other dimension to Kleist, which we found fascinating, was, you know, that he was in love. He was engaged to a woman, Jean Eunice Monchon, and he he corresponds with her and he talks about his fears. He talks about the way in which he's fighting this war to protect her from the world outside.

And then we we describe the way in which that hostile outside world then encroaches upon him. So I think for me, he was the key figure. But Steve, I don't know what you think. yeah i mean ed you it's a great question because um there was i mean when you read yeah when you when you go into the material you know the material we have we're very fortunate in that a lot of uh veterans of the battle uh they did interviews or they wrote books or articles and when you go through this stuff it's it is it is clear i mean these guys and by and large they're just ordinary guys and certainly if you think about our three main characters ed heinemann born in Saginaw Michigan um Chester Nimitz he's born in Fredericksburg Texas and Dusty

Kleiss in Coffeyville Kansas these guys are just from small towns and they're not from I mean Kleiss and Nimitz end up going to the Naval Academy but they do so um you know their parents didn't go to university they they wanted to um apply themselves they got the you know they got the itch in their late teen teenage years they thought I want to see the world you know I'm going to, I want to try and get into Annapolis and that, and, and they did, and they managed it, you know, cause they had teachers. It's really interesting when you think about it, they were able to pass their entrance exams and be competitive for Annapolis

because they had teachers in their small towns who spent time with them, you know, and, and it helped them with their extra homework. You know, I mean, it's really, it is, it's a story about ordinary people. And I guess it kind of goes back to your, one of your earlier questions about why another book on Midway. And that's because, you know, in some respects, we're forgetting the pacific war we're forgetting all of the uh the sacrifices that were made there and the hard work that went into winning that war well this is a great book to read to get to know

exactly what took place to have a way into the to the war i mean it was an enormous conflict francis pike talks about how it was it took place over an area that was three times the size of the european theater so it's enormous enormous theater of battle in the pacific so you need some way in to start to learn about it. And I think this book and the Battle of Midway and how America won that war is a great way to do that. So that's what I would say. I mean, I think The Ordinary Man is, I think you're exactly right, so important. So I guess, and you may have kind of answered this, was there one person you found you really liked to write about? Doesn't have to be the person that you most like, but someone that you just found as a writer, hey, it was fun to write

about him or it was easy to write about the person what do you reckon brendan well i think we've already mentioned a number of of characters um i mean on the japanese so i won't repeat them on the japanese side we have the um uh a torpedo and bomber pilot so he he uh flew used torpedoes against ships and then bombs for for ground missions attacking midway was called juzo mori um and we found him an attractive character because he was somebody who talked about his feelings he was rather salty language um and then after the the war um he um you know he goes off and he runs a bar um and so you get we try to give a sense in the uh in the subsequent chapter in the legacy chapter uh just how diverse the subsequent careers of some of the protagonists

are i mean one of them got religion and in a big way i don't know if steve wants to speak to that that he's he's our religion expert yeah that's for sheena it is very interesting i mean yeah religion does play a role in the book um it's definitely something that uh it just comes up and it's in unexpected ways so that it becomes an issue between kleiss and his his girlfriend they they they have different beliefs about god and so this this is like something that almost ends their relationship and um yeah so it does religion religion makes a difference i i guess in terms of character characters i enjoyed i mean i enjoyed um cleo dobson he was a landing signal officer he was a dauntless pilot on the enterprise and um he he wrote this diary that was transcribed by

uh some members of his family who who um uh they self-published his his diary on amazon you can get it it's it's amazing to read um and what i liked about it is he you know so you're getting with him you're getting a source that he's writing at the time so he's writing it as events are unfolding and i feel like with that you're getting it it's just you always have to wonder when you're reading someone's account to what extent it's being filtered through the passage of time and the way they see things in retrospect and you know that's something that we consider more in more detail at the end of the book when we think about the legacy of the battle but Dobson's memoir or his journal that he that was published by his family that was I really enjoyed um getting to

know him and and some of the things that he said and being able to put that into the book because um you know you're seeing you know so he says the battle is a turning point he says that in June he says that pretty much on the day of the battle he recognizes this and it was incredible to read you know to read that and to read how he was what he thought about carrier um uh about naval warfare and you know and just it's just it's really something it was that i think i enjoyed i enjoyed his work and um you're saying the legacy of the battle and brings me to you know midway's almost got a mythical place in american world war ii history you know i would say you know most people know normandy and you know pearl harbor the atomic bombings and they know midway uh why

do you think that it has such a myth the mythical place in american history well you're absolutely right that it has that place and we know that uh not least because you know there are two very big uh major scale movies uh the one with charlton heston in 1976 and then uh a one by a director by Roland Emmerich in 2019. And they're both actually rather good movies. I mean, the 1976 one is historically inaccurate in important respects, but it's artistically, I think, very good.

And the Roland Emmerich movie is historically, you know, pretty much 100% accurate with a couple of very small dramatic licenses taken. So that's a real achievement. And he went to a lot of trouble to consult experts on the battle. But I think the reason why Americans remember this battle is probably, we would say, for the wrong reason. I think it's because they have in their heads the idea that this was a battle that was decided by chance, that it was decided because Naguma was about to launch his strike and was then preempted by the Americans. And we know that's not the case. He wasn't anywhere ready to launch.

And so what we think is the main the main truth about battle, which is the role of, you know, just preparation, training, skill and endurance, that tends to be to be rather lost. But, Steve, I don't know what you think. yeah i mean i i suppose um i suppose that uh in some respects you know so the navy remembers this uh it remembers the battle it commemorates the battle every year um but i mean i i think um there is a waning there's yeah there's a fate there's just our knowledge on the pacific war has faded um and the extent to which we know about midway i i think what brendan said there is this aspect in which we think of it as uh as the result of divine intervention or chance or um yeah which you know which however much those things play a role it's um you know it's important

to know about the other issues but the good the good reason to to remember it is of course the fact that it marks the point when basically the heart is torn out of the japanese naval aviation striking force so they lose four of their six uh main fleet carriers of the kiddo butai of the mobile force uh and essentially um they're unable then to to launch further attacks uh in the direction of hawaii um and the the offensive which they do launch to the south towards guadalcanal is greatly weakened so the counterfactual you'd have to run is what if the japanese had won at the Battle of Midway, then most likely they would also prevail at Guadalcanal. The outcome of the war, we argue in the book, would still have been the same because ultimately U.S. industrial might

would have told, but it would have been a very different war. It would have been a war where the United States would be on the defensive in the Pacific for a much longer period. It would have made it difficult to pursue the Germany first strategy, which of course Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed. So I think those are the good reasons why people will remember Midway's as a turning point. But we think they should also remember it as a triumph for the peacetime Navy and for the American society, which produced that weapon. I really liked the legacy chapter. And, you know, you were bringing up that people, Americans are forgetting the lessons of the Pacific War, but you're bringing up in the

legacy chapter, that the Chinese Navy is studying the lessons of Midway. And what do you think some of the lessons for the U.S. Navy are today? Well, one lesson, I mean, I think you're right. I think it's important. It's important today. One lesson, there's a few, I mean, but one is that the Navy that you bring to war is the Navy that you have in peace on, you know, sort of touches on what we've we've been discussing it's like you go to war you know war takes place in in in our world it doesn't doesn't take place in a different world so the the the soldiers the sailors uh the airmen all the people the marines the people who participate in war um they are they come they come from uh the rest of society and uh i i think there's a lot of ways that's important but one

is just that that's all the more reason for us to train to to uh to prepare now um so there is there's like there's a lesson of preparation um in there what do you brendan what are your thoughts yeah i i agree with that um and i think also that uh there's a danger of complacency uh we have in our heads um a notion that you know you have pearl harbor uh and that is then followed by by reversal like midway um and the point we make in the book is yes uh we could quite easily um suffer another pearl harbor a surprise attack and and a serious defeat whichever way you look at it uh but there's no guarantee that we will be gifted another midway um a midway uh is not a deliverance it's not a fluke um a midway has to be earned uh and fought for and as steve says i mean the time to start

preparing for that is is actually now or better still yesterday i think too the other the other aspect of the battle which still has relevance is just that you know that's the geography it's where it takes place uh because the pacific is the theater where uh midway occurs in the second world war and the pacific is once again where uh we're seeing uh rivalry between great powers so if you want to understand how to get how to how to fight war in the pacific what better than to read a book which examines exactly how that took place uh in the 1940s so is there anything else you two would like to discuss about the book in our last little bit what do you reckon brendan i mean there's a lot yeah i mean i don't want to do too much because we want people to go out and

buy the book i think i think that was quite a good conclusion um so i don't i don't really have anything to add actually so the book the silver waterfall how america won the war in the pacific at midway is available in all major bookstores and amazon barnes and noble everywhere correct yes and um i have to admit i do have right here on my desk hitler's american gamble to read next so um that's what i'm going to be hitting next so what are you two going to be working on next and how can people follow you you know social media that kind of thing oh good question um you know i'll be working on uh i have a book that i've done on foreign policy during the american civil war i'll be working on that um you can follow me um i'm not really on social media i i i i yeah i

have social media it's just a different thing i i mean um so yeah i i mean uh i i'm gonna have a newsletter so you can sign up you sign up for my newsletter my website uh stephen-mcgregor.com and uh i'm not i don't send out many things but i will i will send out you know things now and then on there and so it'd be great to uh to hear from people sign up and um yeah we'll be in touch so my next book is probably going to be on the great powers today looking at which are the great powers uh at the moment um why they are so why certain powers are not great powers what constitutes a great power uh so that's the project um i'm like steve i'm not on social media but i do run the center for geopolitics at cambridge so if you're interested to know what

i'm doing and what the center is doing more generally uh do go online and look up center for Geopolitics, Cambridge, and you can register for our events. And many of them are on Zoom. So I think people listening to the podcast will be able to tune into them, even if they can't come to the in-person events. All right.

Well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you for watching.