70th Anniversary - Battle of Midway

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Navy marks Battle of Midway's 70th anniversary
POSTED: 05:13 a.m. HST, Jun 04, 2012 LAST UPDATED: 05:15 a.m. HST, Jun 04, 2012 StarAdvertiser.com


By Audrey McAvoy
Associated Press


PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii >> Six months after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan sent four aircraft carriers to the tiny Pacific atoll of Midway to draw out and destroy what remained of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

But this time the U.S. knew about Japan's plans. U.S. cryptologists had cracked Japanese communications codes, giving Fleet Commander Adm. Chester Nimitz notice of where Japan would strike, the day and time of the attack, and what ships the enemy would bring to the fight.

The U.S. was badly outnumbered and its pilots less experienced than Japan's. Even so, it sank four Japanese aircraft carriers the first day of the three-day battle and put Japan on the defensive, greatly diminishing its ability to project air power as it had in the attack on Hawaii.

On Monday, current Pacific Fleet commander, Adm. Cecil Haney and other officials will fly 1,300 miles northwest from Oahu to Midway to market the 70th anniversary of the pivotal battle that changed the course of the Pacific war.

"After the battle of Midway we always maintained the initiative and for the remaining three years of the war, the Japanese reacted to us," said Vice Adm. Michael Rogers, commander of the U.S. Fleet Cyber Command, told a crowd gathered outside Nimitz's old office at Pearl Harbor on Friday to commemorate the role naval intelligence played in the events of Jun 4-7, 1942.

"It all started really in May of 1942 with station Hypo (the Combat Intelligence Unit at Pearl Harbor) and the work of some great people working together to try to understand what were the Japanese thinking, what were they going to do," Rogers said Friday.

Intelligence wasn't the only reason for U.S. victory.

The brave heroics by dive bomber pilots, Japanese mistakes and luck all played a role. But Nimitz himself observed it was critical to the outcome, said retired Rear Adm. Mac Showers, the last surviving member of the intelligence team that deciphered Japanese messages.

"His statement a few days later was 'had it not been for the excellent intelligence that was provided, we would have read about the capture of Midway in the morning newspaper,'" said Showers said in an interview.

Japan's vessels outnumbered U.S. ships 4-to-1, Japan's aviators had more experience, and its Zero fighter planes could easily outmaneuver U.S. aircraft.

But Japan, unlike the U.S., had little knowledge of what its enemy was doing.

Japanese commanders believed a U.S. task force was far away in the Solomon Islands. Then, as June 4 neared and Nimitz prepared his troops, Japanese commanders failed to recognize signs of increased military activity around Hawaii as an indication the U.S. had uncovered their plans to attack Midway, the site of a small U.S. base.

The U.S. lost one carrier, 145 planes and 307 men. Japan lost four aircraft carriers, a heavy cruiser, 291 planes and 4,800 men, according to the U.S. Navy and to an account by former Japanese naval officers in "Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, the Japanese Navy's Story."

The defeat was so overwhelming that the Japanese navy kept the details a closely guarded secret and most Japanese never heard of the battle until after the war.

Nimitz got his intelligence from Showers and a few dozen others relentlessly analyzing Japanese code in the basement of a Pearl Harbor administrative building.

Japanese messages were written using 45,000 five-digit numbers representing phrases and words.

The cryptographers had to figure out what the numbers said without the aid of computers.

"In order to read the messages, we had to recover the meaning of each one of those code groups. The main story of our work was recovering code group meanings one-by-painful-one," Showers said.

At the time of the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, they understood a small fraction of the messages. By May 1942, they could make educated guesses.

A key breakthrough came when they determined Japan was using the letters "AF" to refer to Midway.

Showers said Cmdr. Joseph Rochefort, the team's leader, and Nimitz were confident the letters referred to the atoll. But Adm. Ernest King, the Navy's top commander, wanted to be sure before he allowed Nimitz to send the precious few U.S. aircraft carriers out to battle.

So Nimitz had the patrol base at Midway send a message to Oahu saying the island's distillation plant was down, and it urgently needed fresh water. Soon after, both an intelligence team in Australia and Rochefort's unit picked up a Japanese message saying "AF" had a water shortage.

Showers was an ensign in the office, having just joined the Navy. He analyzed code deciphered by cryptographers, plotted ships on maps of the Pacific, and filed information.

Now 92 and living in Arlington, Va., the Iowa City, Iowa native went on to a career in intelligence. He served on Nimitz's staff on Guam toward the end of the war, and returned later to Pearl Harbor for stints leading the Pacific Fleet's intelligence effort. After the Navy, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Showers said commanders weren't always as open to using intelligence to plan their course of attack the way Nimitz was. Some were suspicious of it.

But Midway changed that.

"It used to be a lot of people thought intelligence was something mysterious and they didn't believe in it and they didn't have to pay attention to it. Admiral Nimitz was fortunately what we call intelligence-friendly," Showers said.

 

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Vets join commemoration of 1942 Battle of Midway
POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Jun 05, 2012 LAST UPDATED: 01:36 a.m. HST, Jun 05, 2012 StarAdvertiser.com


The decisive World War II fight shook the atoll 70 years ago


By Dan Nakaso

MIDWAY ATOLL » Two retired Marines — both of them 90 years old — made the long trip to this isolated spit of coral and sand for the first time in 70 years to commemorate the Battle of Midway, while the head of the Pacific Fleet vowed that America will continue to commemorate the battle "as long as we have a United States Navy."

Adm. Cecil D. Haney made his remarks to reporters following Monday's ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the start of the three-day land and sea battle that changed the course of World War II.

The gathering of 71 people was all the more unusual because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the steward for the three islands collectively known as Midway Atoll, tightly controls visits from outsiders.

"We know why this place resonates in people's hearts, and we honor that," Regional Director Robyn Thorson said. "Our celebrations will change when we no longer may have veterans to honor, but we honor the veterans who are here."

In response to a question about how long the 70-year-old Battle of Midway will be marked, given the ages of the survivors, Haney said, "Obviously, it's hard for me to predict. That's in God's hands. But I will say that we will continue to commemorate the Battle of Midway for many, many years — as long as we have a United States Navy, I will predict, because it is so, so important to our heritage that we study it in our schools, we stop to pause and reflect each and every year on this battle, and, quite frankly, it will continue on."

Monday's commemoration honored the heroism, courage and sacrifices of the thousands of Marines and sailors who were bombed and strafed on Midway and at sea — while also marking the pres*ent-day wildlife successes at the northernmost atoll in the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

Monday's commemoration took months of planning. But the pace of preparations sped up just after 2:30 a.m. when 71 people — including 26 active-duty military members stationed in Hono*lulu — lifted off from Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in a C-40 Clipper transport jet to arrive before sunrise at Midway, 1,250 miles away.

The early arrival was scheduled to reduce the odds of hitting any of the thousands of Laysan and black-footed albatrosses that fill the skies and cover the grounds of Midway — or harm any of the threatened and endangered species that also call the atoll home.

Among the passengers aboard the military flight were World War II veterans who served on Midway after the battle, current naval officers and even a civilian who was born on Midway 56 years ago.

But the highlight of Monday's commemoration was the presence of retired Marine Col. John Miniclier of Mount Dora, Fla., and retired Marine Sgt. Edgar Fox of Springfield, Mo., who arrived at Midway last week.

While the U.S. Navy and Imperial Japa*nese Fleet waged a bloody sea battle of aircraft carriers and battleships, Miniclier and Fox were both Marine privates assigned to repel Japa*nese bombers — and Japa*nese soldiers should they come ashore at Midway.

Neither Marine fired a single shot during the three-day battle — and neither had ever returned to Midway.

But at the age of 90, Miniclier knew it was time to travel all the way from his home outside Orlando, Fla.

"I'm doing it for G Battery," he said. "I'm here to represent the Marines."

During the battle, the island was heavily bombed by Japa*nese aircraft, and Midway-based aircraft suffered extensive losses as they attacked the enemy fleet. The decisive action occurred at sea, which spared the atoll from a Japa*nese invasion.

MIDWAY goes by many names.

In 2001 the secretary of the interior designated the atoll a national memorial, and it's now called Battle of Midway National Memorial. But environmentalists often refer to Midway's other official name, the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge.

Midway's reputation as both a historical battle site and its pres*ent-day status as a national wildlife refuge dominated the sentiments of Monday's ceremony honoring the sacrifices and courage of American forces.

Surrounded by thousands of juvenile albatrosses on the ground and in the sky, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Thorson told the gathering, "I notice that the front row is taken by birds, of course, reflective perhaps that this is now a national wildlife refuge."

As she choked up, Thorson continued, "I also carry in my heart a tribute to my father, who was a combat veteran in the Pacific in World War II and will never see the beaches of New Guinea, where he fought with another branch of the military service, the U.S. Army. But I pay tribute to him here, and I think we all carry in our hearts tributes to many who fought in that amazing and difficult conflict of World War II. With each passing year there are fewer veterans of the historic Midway battle who are able to attend these commemorations."

For Lisa Brackin, 56, returning to Midway represented a homecoming.

Brackin, daughter of a Navy veteran, was born on Midway and had not returned since 1999, when she worked as a flight attendant. At the time, visitors were encouraged to fish, scuba dive, tour bullet hole-ridden military sites and photograph endangered and threatened species.

Brackin, who now lives in Spokane, Wash., called it "an honor" to attend Monday's commemoration of the Battle of Midway.

But her real motivation was coming "home."

As soon as she landed, Brackin was hit by Midway's humidity and the smell of thousands of albatross hidden by darkness.

"To me it smells like home, like when you walk into Grandma's house," Brackin said. "Midway — it gets in your blood."