I’ll answer a slightly different question – what film I would have liked to have had a sequel for that didn’t. I don’t know enough about the factors that go into deciding to fund sequels of movies.
I’d like to have had a sequel for Tora Tora Tora! doing Midway.
Tora Tora Tora! covers the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is, also in my opinion, one of the best war films out there. A lot of war films fall into a “rah rah rah good guys versus bad guys” thing; Tora Tora Tora! had both Japanese and American teams working on it and was designed for release in both countries, and was, I would say, impressively-objective. It was pretty light on actual action shots, which I think was probably reasonable – the really critical factors were decisions made in the runup to the event, rather than the specific actions of any one person on-scene. I believe that it did do a good job of highlighting the significant factors leading to the outcome.
Looking at IMDB, a number of people seemed to feel that Tora Tora Tora! was boring. It had a lot of people talking, and not a lot of actual combat shots (and those were not high-budget, not where the money really went).
The 1976 Midway was not good.
The 2019 Midway was better, but the things that it was good at tended to be the kinds of things that Hollywood conventionally does well – high production values, pretty lighting, lots of action shots, people being tough, etc. I was kind of irritated by the amount of coverage that John Ford got – I appreciate that he was one of Hollywood’s own, and he was in the middle of things, but he was really not very significant in the grand scheme of things. Contrast that with, say, Henry Harrison in Gettysburg, the actor who was working for the Confederate States of America, where the people making the movie enjoyed repeatedly pointing out that Harrison was an actor…but at least there, Harrison really did have a meaningful role in the battle.
It also was awfully light on a few important bits that arguably didn’t reflect very well on the US. Tora Tora Tora! talks about material that was covered in analysis on what went wrong, so it doesn’t shy away from that. Midway tends to gloss over some bits. It does cover some, like McClusky’s error in target selection that almost caused Enterprise’s strike to leave Akagi undamaged.
However, a more-serious set of issues weren’t. Maybe the most-serious – in the actual battle, one of the most-critical issues was that a significant part of the three carriers’ flight groups headed off into nowhere. Partway through the flight, one of the torpedo bomber squadron commanders, Waldron, disagreed with the flight’s commander, Ring, told Ring that he was flying to the wrong place, openly mutinied and ordered his squadron to disregard Ring and fly to where he thought the Japanese carriers were. This was in a strike where working together between different types of aircraft was absolutely critical and the entire operational Pacific American carrier force was at stake. That is court-martial material, and probably the only reason it didn’t happen was because (a) Waldron was absolutely right, and had flown directly to the Japanese carriers, attacking without support, whereas Ring flew the rest of the planes off into nowhere and had some ditch on the way back, and (b) Waldron was killed along with all but one of his squadron when he conducted his attack solo. But then there’s the question of why Ring was flying off into the middle of nowhere. I think that modern historians – think John Parshall or the US Naval Institute – present an extremely unflattering
picture of Mitscher, one of the carrier commanders, who likely disregarded his own actual orders from his carrier force commander, Spruance, and sent his own forces off into the middle of nowhere due to disagreeing with him. Further, it’s likely that Mitscher concealed information on the situation – a situation for which he was likely in large part responsible – from being sent back up to higher command. While Mitscher did ultimately redeem himself, did well later in the war, this could easily have been a career-ending move, and because of that move, the battle ultimately was much more on a knife edge than it needed to be.
Its focus on the action rather than the leadup to the battles and the decisions that caused various events to happen the way they do is why it can get through four entire battles – the attack on Pearl Harbor, the subsequent American raid on the Marshalls, the Doolittle Raid, and the Battle of Midway – in a single movie. There’s enough time to cover four battles in one movie if you’re heavily-weighting action shots, but you can only do that if you throw out most of the decision-making leading to those battles.
It did spend some time covering the intelligence side of Midway, which was significant, but that was only really one input into the calls that were made, and only for one of the four battles.
It’s not that I don’t feel that there’s a place for that sort of action-oriented movie, but there are also lots of them, but very few war movies like Tora Tora Tora!
That is an epic answer. And you’ve convinced me I need to watch Tora Tora Tora! again because the last time I watched it I was probably under 10 and had no appreciation for it, particularly on network television cut with commercials.
I was always under the impression that Midway was in the bag thanks to the Americans breaking the Japanese codes.
So, this is getting outside the movie itself, but…
That gave the US a major advantage relative to where they would have otherwise been – they otherwise would have probably had at most just two carriers instead of three, and an unprepared island garrison versus the four Japanese carriers (and large follow-up surface fleet that was coming behind). Japan’s intention was to force a lopsided battle with the American carriers. Japan had a picket line of submarines that would have had a shot at the US’s carriers if they sortied from Hawaii; because the Americans moved early, the carriers were already past the submarines by the time that they were in place.
But it was by no means in the bag simply because of the intelligence. That intelligence was probably necessary for the US to have done what it did at the Battle of Midway, but not alone sufficient. The Japanese and American carrier air wings, even with the US doing emergency patch-up to get an extra carrier into the fight, were close in size. Midway’s garrison absorbed the initial Japanese air attack, but even with the US putting every aircraft it could on the island, the land-based air arm didn’t do much to the Japanese fleet (though a bomb or two from a land-based aircraft falling differently could also have significantly affected the outcome; Lady Luck played her role on both sides). The Japanese fleet did detect the American carriers and had been on the verge of launching a strike against them, and were only boxed out by minutes. That boxing out only happened because of an extraordinary series of lucky events for the US – various groups of American aircraft showing up at the right times to prevent Japan from launching strikes; the USS Nautilus being held down by the Japanese destroyer Arashi; McClusky leading USS Enterprise’s strike group – which did a huge amount of the damage and was going to miss the Japanese fleet – seeing Arashi and deciding to fly ahead of its path in the hopes that it was heading for the Japanese carriers; and Yorktown’s and Enterprise’s dive bomber groups actually hitting with their weapons after poor earlier performance from some other – often much-less-experienced – air groups. Normally, the weapon one would want to use against a carrier or other large ships were torpeoes; the American torpedo bombers generally weren’t able to land hits and at that point in the war, American torpedoes had a number of technical problems. The Japanese pilots in the fleet in the early war were generally much-better trained than the American pilots, and had performed significantly better; had the Japanese managed to get that strike off, the American carriers would have been in trouble.
One reason that the Battle of Midway makes for a cinema-friendly movie is because events that happened in a short period of time did a great deal to drastically determine the battle’s outcome. It could very easily have been a lopsided battle in the other direction.
A better statement is that, with what we know today, the US probably more-or-less had the war in the bag, albeit not that battle. It’s difficult to see how Japan could have won the war; their war plan, Kantai Kessen, was gambling on one great Japanese naval victory over the US, a resultant collapse in American public support for the war, and for the US to give up when it realistically had a great deal of ability to continue a war and strong long-term advantage. In general, I think that planners in most countries drastically-underestimated the willingness of publics in various countries to continue and sustain a war effort. My own guess – and I want to be clear here that I am not echoing any expert analysis that I have read – is that this had a lot to do with war planners in a number of countries focusing on Russia’s collapse in World War I (and in Japan’s case, Russia’s loss in the Russo-Japanese War; their actions looked in many ways similar to attempting a repeat of their attack on Russia there) and believing that it could be extrapolated to other countries and other times. The right lesson, I think, was probably that Imperial Russia had a lot of very serious political problems around the time of those wars, not that it was particularly easy to defeat major powers.
As for the Battle of Midway itself, the best sources in terms of understanding the battle are probably in text form, but if one wants to watch a pretty good – in my opinion – documentary-style set of videos, I’d recommend Montemayor’s series of three YouTube videos on Midway. They don’t have fantastic production values, have the occasional capitalization error, but the history is solid, and they do a good job of talking about most of the actual factors that determined the battle. And they keep maps visible, so one can see what’s happening.
Montemayor also doesn’t talk about Mitscher, though it’s also not as if he actively avoids that; he does cover American organizational problems effectively in his video on the Battle of Savo Island: “Battle of Savo Island 1942: America’s Worst Naval Defeat”.
I like all of Allan Furst’s WW2 novels, but this is the most nautical. Dutch freighter captain is recruited into the British service. War book, sea tale, spy story all rolled into one.
Connections is an old BBC history series I stumbled upon a while back. The presenter shows how so many things interconnect to form the future.
Cryptonomicon. Neal Stephenson. I suggest this book to anyone who likes to get lost in a novel.
The grandfather is a WW2 codebreaker tasked with keeping the Nazis from finding out that the Allies were reading their mail. His grandson is trying to set up an online bank in 1990’s Manila.
It must take great effort to write all that so well and link sources and provide recommendations for greater understanding. Please know it is deeply appreciated. My grandpa was in the Pacific theater and I find it fascinating.
I’ll answer a slightly different question – what film I would have liked to have had a sequel for that didn’t. I don’t know enough about the factors that go into deciding to fund sequels of movies.
I’d like to have had a sequel for Tora Tora Tora! doing Midway.
Tora Tora Tora! covers the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is, also in my opinion, one of the best war films out there. A lot of war films fall into a “rah rah rah good guys versus bad guys” thing; Tora Tora Tora! had both Japanese and American teams working on it and was designed for release in both countries, and was, I would say, impressively-objective. It was pretty light on actual action shots, which I think was probably reasonable – the really critical factors were decisions made in the runup to the event, rather than the specific actions of any one person on-scene. I believe that it did do a good job of highlighting the significant factors leading to the outcome.
Looking at IMDB, a number of people seemed to feel that Tora Tora Tora! was boring. It had a lot of people talking, and not a lot of actual combat shots (and those were not high-budget, not where the money really went).
The 1976 Midway was not good.
The 2019 Midway was better, but the things that it was good at tended to be the kinds of things that Hollywood conventionally does well – high production values, pretty lighting, lots of action shots, people being tough, etc. I was kind of irritated by the amount of coverage that John Ford got – I appreciate that he was one of Hollywood’s own, and he was in the middle of things, but he was really not very significant in the grand scheme of things. Contrast that with, say, Henry Harrison in Gettysburg, the actor who was working for the Confederate States of America, where the people making the movie enjoyed repeatedly pointing out that Harrison was an actor…but at least there, Harrison really did have a meaningful role in the battle.
It also was awfully light on a few important bits that arguably didn’t reflect very well on the US. Tora Tora Tora! talks about material that was covered in analysis on what went wrong, so it doesn’t shy away from that. Midway tends to gloss over some bits. It does cover some, like McClusky’s error in target selection that almost caused Enterprise’s strike to leave Akagi undamaged.
However, a more-serious set of issues weren’t. Maybe the most-serious – in the actual battle, one of the most-critical issues was that a significant part of the three carriers’ flight groups headed off into nowhere. Partway through the flight, one of the torpedo bomber squadron commanders, Waldron, disagreed with the flight’s commander, Ring, told Ring that he was flying to the wrong place, openly mutinied and ordered his squadron to disregard Ring and fly to where he thought the Japanese carriers were. This was in a strike where working together between different types of aircraft was absolutely critical and the entire operational Pacific American carrier force was at stake. That is court-martial material, and probably the only reason it didn’t happen was because (a) Waldron was absolutely right, and had flown directly to the Japanese carriers, attacking without support, whereas Ring flew the rest of the planes off into nowhere and had some ditch on the way back, and (b) Waldron was killed along with all but one of his squadron when he conducted his attack solo. But then there’s the question of why Ring was flying off into the middle of nowhere. I think that modern historians – think John Parshall or the US Naval Institute – present an extremely unflattering
picture of Mitscher, one of the carrier commanders, who likely disregarded his own actual orders from his carrier force commander, Spruance, and sent his own forces off into the middle of nowhere due to disagreeing with him. Further, it’s likely that Mitscher concealed information on the situation – a situation for which he was likely in large part responsible – from being sent back up to higher command. While Mitscher did ultimately redeem himself, did well later in the war, this could easily have been a career-ending move, and because of that move, the battle ultimately was much more on a knife edge than it needed to be.
Its focus on the action rather than the leadup to the battles and the decisions that caused various events to happen the way they do is why it can get through four entire battles – the attack on Pearl Harbor, the subsequent American raid on the Marshalls, the Doolittle Raid, and the Battle of Midway – in a single movie. There’s enough time to cover four battles in one movie if you’re heavily-weighting action shots, but you can only do that if you throw out most of the decision-making leading to those battles.
It did spend some time covering the intelligence side of Midway, which was significant, but that was only really one input into the calls that were made, and only for one of the four battles.
It’s not that I don’t feel that there’s a place for that sort of action-oriented movie, but there are also lots of them, but very few war movies like Tora Tora Tora!
That is an epic answer. And you’ve convinced me I need to watch Tora Tora Tora! again because the last time I watched it I was probably under 10 and had no appreciation for it, particularly on network television cut with commercials.
I had never heard any of this before.
I was always under the impression that Midway was in the bag thanks to the Americans breaking the Japanese codes.
Never heard the name Waldron before.
You are correct; it would be a great movie.
So, this is getting outside the movie itself, but…
That gave the US a major advantage relative to where they would have otherwise been – they otherwise would have probably had at most just two carriers instead of three, and an unprepared island garrison versus the four Japanese carriers (and large follow-up surface fleet that was coming behind). Japan’s intention was to force a lopsided battle with the American carriers. Japan had a picket line of submarines that would have had a shot at the US’s carriers if they sortied from Hawaii; because the Americans moved early, the carriers were already past the submarines by the time that they were in place.
But it was by no means in the bag simply because of the intelligence. That intelligence was probably necessary for the US to have done what it did at the Battle of Midway, but not alone sufficient. The Japanese and American carrier air wings, even with the US doing emergency patch-up to get an extra carrier into the fight, were close in size. Midway’s garrison absorbed the initial Japanese air attack, but even with the US putting every aircraft it could on the island, the land-based air arm didn’t do much to the Japanese fleet (though a bomb or two from a land-based aircraft falling differently could also have significantly affected the outcome; Lady Luck played her role on both sides). The Japanese fleet did detect the American carriers and had been on the verge of launching a strike against them, and were only boxed out by minutes. That boxing out only happened because of an extraordinary series of lucky events for the US – various groups of American aircraft showing up at the right times to prevent Japan from launching strikes; the USS Nautilus being held down by the Japanese destroyer Arashi; McClusky leading USS Enterprise’s strike group – which did a huge amount of the damage and was going to miss the Japanese fleet – seeing Arashi and deciding to fly ahead of its path in the hopes that it was heading for the Japanese carriers; and Yorktown’s and Enterprise’s dive bomber groups actually hitting with their weapons after poor earlier performance from some other – often much-less-experienced – air groups. Normally, the weapon one would want to use against a carrier or other large ships were torpeoes; the American torpedo bombers generally weren’t able to land hits and at that point in the war, American torpedoes had a number of technical problems. The Japanese pilots in the fleet in the early war were generally much-better trained than the American pilots, and had performed significantly better; had the Japanese managed to get that strike off, the American carriers would have been in trouble.
One reason that the Battle of Midway makes for a cinema-friendly movie is because events that happened in a short period of time did a great deal to drastically determine the battle’s outcome. It could very easily have been a lopsided battle in the other direction.
A better statement is that, with what we know today, the US probably more-or-less had the war in the bag, albeit not that battle. It’s difficult to see how Japan could have won the war; their war plan, Kantai Kessen, was gambling on one great Japanese naval victory over the US, a resultant collapse in American public support for the war, and for the US to give up when it realistically had a great deal of ability to continue a war and strong long-term advantage. In general, I think that planners in most countries drastically-underestimated the willingness of publics in various countries to continue and sustain a war effort. My own guess – and I want to be clear here that I am not echoing any expert analysis that I have read – is that this had a lot to do with war planners in a number of countries focusing on Russia’s collapse in World War I (and in Japan’s case, Russia’s loss in the Russo-Japanese War; their actions looked in many ways similar to attempting a repeat of their attack on Russia there) and believing that it could be extrapolated to other countries and other times. The right lesson, I think, was probably that Imperial Russia had a lot of very serious political problems around the time of those wars, not that it was particularly easy to defeat major powers.
As for the Battle of Midway itself, the best sources in terms of understanding the battle are probably in text form, but if one wants to watch a pretty good – in my opinion – documentary-style set of videos, I’d recommend Montemayor’s series of three YouTube videos on Midway. They don’t have fantastic production values, have the occasional capitalization error, but the history is solid, and they do a good job of talking about most of the actual factors that determined the battle. And they keep maps visible, so one can see what’s happening.
The Battle of Midway 1942: Told from the Japanese Perspective (1/3)
The Battle of Midway: Hiryu’s Counterstrike (2/3)
The Battle of Midway: The American Perspective and The Strategic Consequences of the Battle (3/3)
Montemayor also doesn’t talk about Mitscher, though it’s also not as if he actively avoids that; he does cover American organizational problems effectively in his video on the Battle of Savo Island: “Battle of Savo Island 1942: America’s Worst Naval Defeat”.
First, you are a very good writer. I usually roll my eyes at a wall of text like that but you convey the ideas clearly.
Second, I am again surprised by how close it was.
Finalyy, I will share some resources you might enjoy.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/dark-voyage-alan-furst/11713695?ean=9780812967968
I like all of Allan Furst’s WW2 novels, but this is the most nautical. Dutch freighter captain is recruited into the British service. War book, sea tale, spy story all rolled into one.
Connections is an old BBC history series I stumbled upon a while back. The presenter shows how so many things interconnect to form the future.
https://youtu.be/XetplHcM7aQ?list=PL5HjoPOFFC56enV6cW1zqRvXyY6pNm8cq
Cryptonomicon. Neal Stephenson. I suggest this book to anyone who likes to get lost in a novel.
The grandfather is a WW2 codebreaker tasked with keeping the Nazis from finding out that the Allies were reading their mail. His grandson is trying to set up an online bank in 1990’s Manila.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/cryptonomicon-neal-stephenson/7899276?ean=9780380788620
Again, thanks for the informative message
It must take great effort to write all that so well and link sources and provide recommendations for greater understanding. Please know it is deeply appreciated. My grandpa was in the Pacific theater and I find it fascinating.