SHATTERED SWORD: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY
By Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully
Potomac Books, 2005 | $35.00 | 613 pages
This incredible book shatters all previous notions of how the Battle of Midway was fought. That sentence is not hyperbole — it is a precise description of what Shattered Sword accomplishes. Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully have done something genuinely rare in military history: they have taken a battle that has been written about exhaustively, from the American side in particular, and produced an account so thoroughly grounded in Japanese primary sources, so meticulously reasoned, and so devastatingly honest about what the existing historiography got wrong, that the previous literature must now be read with fundamental suspicion.
Demolishing Fuchida's Account
The primary target of Parshall and Tully's revisionism is the long-revered account by Fuchida Mitsuo and Masatake Okumiya, Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan, which has served as the foundation for virtually every Western account of the battle from the Japanese perspective since its translation in 1955. The problem, which Parshall and Tully demonstrate with careful citation and methodical argument, is that Fuchida often lied.
This is a serious charge, and they document it seriously. Fuchida's claims about the state of Japanese aircraft on the flight decks at the critical moment of the American dive-bomber attack, about his own activities during the battle, and about the command decisions that preceded the American strikes are all shown to be false in specific, demonstrable ways. The reconstruction of what actually happened — based on Japanese action reports, deck logs, damage surveys, and the accounts of survivors who contradicted Fuchida — is methodologically painstaking and historically devastating.
Yamamoto as the True Villain
The book's reassessment of Japanese leadership is its most intellectually bracing contribution. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who has generally been treated with considerable respect in both Japanese and Western accounts as the architect of Japan's early Pacific successes, emerges from Parshall and Tully's analysis as a bumbling incompetent whose flawed strategy for Midway reflected the fatal flaws of the Japanese military system as a whole.
My own comparison came to mind immediately: instead of Admirals Yamamoto, Kondo, and Nagumo leading Japan's navy at Midway, it turns out we had something closer to Admirals Curly, Moe, and Shep. The operational plan was incoherent. The force disposition scattered Japan's naval strength across multiple objectives simultaneously while concentrating nowhere sufficient to achieve decisive results. The command relationships were dysfunctional. And the basic assumption — that the Americans could not possibly respond effectively to a surprise attack on Midway — reflected an intelligence failure of the first order combined with the kind of institutional arrogance that follows from a long string of unchallenged successes.
The Incredible Contrast
One of Shattered Sword's most powerful and most humane qualities is the attention it pays to the men below flag rank — the sailors, mechanics, and aircrews who flew the missions and kept the ships running despite leadership that was failing them. The contrast between the exceptional courage and professionalism of individual Japanese sailors and airmen and the catastrophic inadequacy of the officers who commanded them is drawn with unmistakable clarity and genuine sympathy.
These were not incompetent men who deserved to die. They were skilled professionals abandoned by a command structure that was fighting the wrong battle with the wrong assumptions. The tragedy of Midway, seen from the Japanese side through Parshall and Tully's account, is more profound and more human than the triumphalist American narrative has typically allowed.
The Writing
At 613 pages, Shattered Sword is a substantial commitment, and Parshall and Tully have written prose that makes that commitment worthwhile. The writing deftly skips from colloquial to lyric — capable of the technical precision that operational military history requires and also of the narrative momentum that keeps pages turning at midnight. The minute-by-minute account of the critical hours on June 4, 1942, is as gripping as any battle narrative I have read, and it is also, by all evidence, accurate — which is more than can be said for most of the accounts it replaces.
The authors reevaluate their subjects' reputations "with a fair if sometimes savage candor" — a description that applies to the book as a whole. No one is protected by reputation or rank. The evidence is followed wherever it leads.
Verdict
Shattered Sword is a benchmark in modern history — one of those rare works that genuinely advance the discipline, that make it impossible to treat the previous literature as authoritative without acknowledging what this book has established. It is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand what actually happened at Midway, and why. Highest recommendation.