Set and Drift: Doctrine Matters why the Japanese Lost at Midway

Naval War College Review, Summer, 2001 by Jonathan B. Parshall, David D. Dickson, Anthony P. Tully

The authors wish to extend particular thanks to John Lundstrom, Mark Horan, and Tom Wildenberg for their help and support with this article.

NOTES

(1.) The authors assisted Nauticos Corporation in identifying a large section of wreckage from the Kaga, discovered at a depth of seventeen thousand feet in September 1999. As a result of this project, the authors are currently working on a forthcoming book that will examine in detail the operations of the four Japanese carriers at Midway, bringing new Japanese sources to light in the process.

(2.) The Japanese referred to this process as "continuous stowage" (renzoku shuyo) and practiced it from the 1930s onward. From an unpublished manuscript by Mark Peattie, tentatively entitled "Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941," used by permission of the author; Air Technical Intelligence Group [hereafter ATIG], Report 2, Bureau of Aeronautics, 1946, p. 2.

(3.) It should be noted that our comments pertain to early-war Japanese carrier design and doctrine. As such, some of our remarks may, at first glance, appear to be at variance with such sources as U.S. Naval Technical Mission to Japan [hereafter NavTech] Report A-11 (Washington, D.C.: Govt. Print. Off., 1946), which discusses Japanese naval aviation equipment and carrier design. However, it must be remembered that the goal of the NayTech reports was to gather information after the war to improve the U.S. Navy's own practices. As such, its primary area of interest was documenting late-war Japanese doctrine and equipment, rather than chronicling the development of that doctrine per se. For instance, carriers such as the late-war Unryuclass (which was a derivative of the original Hiryu design) did indeed have the ability to perform more operations on the flight deck than their predecessors, and by 1944 Japanese doctrine had evolved to view the flight deck in a different light. However, it must be remembered tha t these doctrinal changes were the direct result of battle experience (much of it negative) gained early in the war at places such as Midway. As a result, the way Japanese carriers operated in 1942 was different in certain respects from the way they operated in 1944.

(4.) ATIG Report 2, p. 3, and ATIG Report 5, p. 3. This was due to the inability of the forced-air ventilation systems used in the hangars to cope with the exhaust from multiple aircraft. NavTech Report A-II, p.9.

(5.) Aircraft were usually brought to the flight deck via a single elevator for several reasons. Japanese aircraft were segregated by type and stowed in specific portions of both the upper and lower hangars. Fighters were typically stowed forward, dive-bombers amidship, and torpedo bombers aft. Fighter aircraft, requiring shorter runoffs, were sensibly stored forward, where they were also more immediately accessible. Spotting Akagi's antiship strike therefore would have required lifting the torpedo aircraft using the aft elevator, and the Zeros from the fore. Elevator cycles varied depending on raw elevator speed and whether the aircraft was being delivered from the upper or lower hangar. Akagi and Kaga's elevators were older, slower models requiring cycles longer than one minute to the lower hangar, and they therefore took longer to perform their evolutions than the newer ships of Carrier Division 2. This was particularly unfortunate in light of Kaga's large torpedo plane squadron.