It’s a bit dry, but comprehensive, if one doesn’t mind the injection of the British point of view on a lot of the action. Helps counterbalance some of the other histories I suppose.
However, I was struck by an offhand mention the book made about the Battle of Midway. I’ll have to quote from memory, but the passage went “At this point, <the Japanese Admiral…may have been Nagumo>'s own carrier had been torpedoed…” and then some consequence followed.
Were any Japanese carriers torpedoed at Midway? My understanding has always been that the dive bombers scored all the hits (for the American side, I mean), not to take anything away from the sacrifice of the torpedo squadrons.
I’ve read that a US sub…maybe Nautilus? reported torpedoing a carrier, but the Japanese reported no explosion. Even if that was a dud hit, it had no effect, and that can’t be worth mentioning in the context of a broad overview of the battle, can it?
The Nautilus fired a few fish at the Soryu after she had already been hit by US dive bombers, but all of them were duds, and one in fact broke apart and some Japanese sailors in the water used the flotation bladder in the torp as a flotation device.
The USS Nautilus attacked what was thought to be the Soryu but was later determined to be the Kaga. Of the four torpedoes she fired, only one hit, and it was a dud. The torpedo run happened after the air attack.
The Nautilus did contribute earlier to the battle, though. She carried out an unsuccessful attack on the battleship Kirishima and was chased away by depth charges for her trouble. It was the destroyer Arashi, returning at full steam from her depth charge run, that American SBD Dauntless dive bombers followed all the way back to the Japanese task force.
“Of the two B-26’s lost, one was seen to launch its torpedo and then to strike the flight deck of the carrier and hurtle into the sea. The two remaining planes pulled away at full throttle, attacked by several of the 50 Zeros which swarmed over the enemy ships. Although gunners in both planes had difficulty with their machine guns, they shot down three or four Zeros as they withdrew. There was no opportunity to observe the results of this attack, but the returning pilots believed that the carrier had been damaged by two torpedo hits near the bow.”
Akagi, Soryu, and Kaga were mortally hit by bombs in the next 5 minutes. Admittedly there was another attack later on the surviving Hiryu which is not covered in the passage quoted above. But I think the Penguin History of the Second World War clearly is referring to the first American hits on the three carriers described in Fuchida’s account:
Bolding mine.
That looks like at least a badly-written conflation of different events, if not an outright error. It’s important in a sense because one of the striking military lessons of Midway was the relative worthlessness of the American torpedo bombing system (the planes and the torpedoes were greatly inferior) as well as the ineffectiveness of land-based high-level bombing (initial reports gave the B-17s credit for the destruction but it’s now clear they never scored a hit on any of the Japanese carriers or cruisers). This error implies the American torpedoes got the enemy admiral, when they did no such thing.
Helps counterbalance some of the other histories I suppose.