July 28, 2025 • 48 mins
Historian of Naval Warfare, Dr. Craig Symonds, joined Bo and Joey to provide an overview of the Battle of Midway. Was it the turning point in the Pacific War?
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Want to support the show? Visit buymeacoffee.com/homebrewhistory and become a monthly subscriber to access bonus episodes and exclusive member's only livestreams!
Remember, Home Brew History is brought to you by #civilwartrails! Learn more here: https://www.civilwartrails.org/
Home Brew History is partnered with the Bearded Historian, Jeff Williams. Check out his designs here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheBeardedHistorian
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
M talking about everybody again, we're talking Midway.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
That long last and not the movie either of them. Yes,
well maybe it could come up. Who knows, that might
who knows. Maybe there's a surprise, Maybe there's a surprise.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Bo.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
This has been a long time coming. We were kind
of talking pre show and earlier this week is this
has been one that we've been pretty excited about, this
little two parter on the on the Battle of Midway.
So I'm I'm really excited to dive into it. You know,
it's it's one of those things that I feel like
gets talked about so much. And our problem is we're
(01:08):
very European centric when it comes to World War Two.
Maybe the reason we never touched Midway before was that,
you know, all of our guests were British historians talking
about Britain and World War Two, and you know, a
British fleet, save for some you know, escort actions and
(01:29):
working with the US Navy out in the Pacific, they
kind of don't pop up too too much.
Speaker 4 (01:33):
Out to be fair, the Allies also were a Germany first.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
And we're Germany first podcast.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
You know, so you know, hey, I guess we weren't
or are have been I suppose, but we're here to
rectify that.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Just a little bit, just for a couple of nights,
only two nights.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
On me.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
It's like, come see the rat Pack live at the sand.
But I think before we get started, we'll jump in
do a little commercial break, and then we'll come right
back and we'll get started with our guests and talk
a bit about midway.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
You don't want to miss it, Come on back.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Welcome back to Homebrew History. It is Boe and Joe
and we are joined tonight by the historian emeritus of
the Naval War College, I would argue, probably one of
the finest naval historians of our time. And I actually
got my start knowing doctor Craig Simon's knowing his work
(02:59):
through the Americans Civil War because he wrote a biography
of General Patrick Clayburne, who has of course killed at
the Battle of Franklin, where I worked for. You know,
I think anybody who listened to the show knows I
worked there for too long maybe, but that's how I
got started with him. And then of course Sam was like, oh, yeah,
(03:19):
you know, you ought to read some of Craig's books,
and I was like, oh yeah, I guess I should,
I should, I should, So then I did and it
turns out excellent. So, without further ado, and before I
continue to embarrass the show by all of our flattery,
let's go ahead and bring on doctor Craig.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Simon's good evening, silas.
Speaker 4 (03:43):
Well.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
I again, it's a pleasure to talk with you about
about you know, I would say that there are two
books on Midway that everyone should read. One of them
is Shattered Sword by John Parshall, and then the other
one is uh oh goodness there it is The Battle
of Midway by Craig.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Simons, and I agree with that too.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Have another one. Do you have any other recommendations.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
On Midway in particular? Yeah, now those are the two.
If you've got that, you've got it.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
Those are the two pillars.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah, I would say. I would say Ian Tols trilogy.
His coverage of Midway was really exciting.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Yeah, well, let me eat. In your introduction you mentioned
that the British don't pay a lot of attention to
the Pacific Theater, and that's true enough, but I will
tell this story, and that is that when I was
teaching at the British Naval Academy in nineteen ninety four
ninety five, as a visiting professor, I was teaching of
course on strategy to the young midshipman, and I decided
(04:48):
they needed to hear about midway, and I told the
story and I laid it out and the decision making
process and what ensued, and the faculty there decided it
was so useful to the student who talked about it
all week that they made it a permanent part of
the curriculum. So if they didn't talk about it before,
apparently they do.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Now that's how you leave a lasting impression, right there.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
I hope.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
So, so, Bo, let's get started with our conversation, because
I think what we're going to do is make this
have a two part episode. We're going to do one
episode right now with Doctor Sims. We've got another one
coming up with Sam Cavell, and I think the two
will kind of balance one another pretty well. But let's
talk a little bit about what's going on with the
(05:34):
US Navy, say December eighth, nineteen forty one until June
nineteen forty two.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Yeah, I can do that in about thirty seconds. No. No,
you're absolutely right to point out that the overall strategy,
which had been agreed upon even before Pearl Harbor in
Washington by the American and British heads of services, was
that Germany was by far the more dangerous opponent, the
much larger GDP. They were more, they already occupied half
(06:04):
of Europe. So the thing to do if the United
States got into this war, the thing to do was
to concentrate on Germany first. And that became kind of
a mantra Germany first, We're gonna do Germany first. But
here's the wrinkle to that. Ernest J. King, who was
the Chief of Naval Operations, who took the title cominch
(06:27):
as Commander in chief of the US Fleet, so in
effect wearing two hats. Ernie King decided, you know, if
we do that, if we focus exclusively on Europe, the
Japanese are going to be able to build up their
defenses in the Pacific to such a point that when
we do finally go after them, it'll cost more, it'll
(06:47):
take longer. We need to do something in the Pacific,
something aggressive in the Pacific, something to keep them back
on their heels. So that's one factor. The other factor
is that it became very clear within days of Pearl
Harbor that even though the United States was eager to
fulfill the Germany First plan. We simply didn't have the
(07:11):
wherewithal to do it. We had a tiny little army,
and even if we said, yes, let's invade as soon
as possible, that invasion would have taken place mostly by
British and Canadians. And you know, it's a hard argument
to make that you guys should go do that. So
the combination of King's eagerness to get into the war
(07:33):
in the Pacific and the inability of the English speaking
allies to do really anything serious in nineteen forty two
is what led to not just Germany First, but Germany
and Japan at the same time.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
That's incredibly interesting too, And obviously we kind of hinted
at it a little bit because we know that the
Americans had broke in the Japanese codes, and that kind
of gives, you know, especially minutes, a fore warning that
something is going to happen at midway. And correct me
(08:13):
if I'm wrong, but this was midway at least was
you know, in the thoughts of Yamamoto to at least
strike at the United States's aircraft carriers, that's correct, which
arguably had become more important than the you know, First
World War era dreadnought but Yaomoto knew that. Yeah, but yeah,
can you kind of elaborate a little bit wrong?
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
Let me say something about the codebreakers first, because I
think that's a crucial point that a lot of people misunderstand.
In this way, it is true that a team of
about between eighteen and twenty four dedicated to junior officers
and enlisted men, headed by Lieutenant Commander Joe Rocher, labored
literally around the clock in two air conditioned basement offices
(09:00):
beneath the district headquarters in Hauahu, and hard work led
them to be able to break tiny little pieces of
Japanese radio messages. And I remember there are thousands of these,
thousands of messages coming in all the time. They have
to decide one which ones are going to try to break,
two which parts of them they could break, and then
(09:24):
try to find repeated indications that maybe this means something.
So I want to emphasize them when we say we
broke their codes, that does not mean we're reading their
mail in real time. It means we could winkle out
little pieces of what it looked like they might be
thinking about doing. And that made it hard for the
(09:45):
people in Washington in particular to say, oh, well, well,
now we know what they're going to do. And a
lot of the credit goes to Nimts. Chester Nimmitz, about
whom I wrote a book so I am not entirely unprejudiced,
left a lot of that to Chester. Nim to trust
both Rochfort and his intelligence Bran Nimitz's own intelligence officer,
(10:07):
Edwin Layton, that these little bits of information did in
fact mean that Japanese were going to do this. Now,
now he had a check on this in the Coral Sea.
Remember in May, or first week of May of nineteen
forty two, Lighton came into Nimitz's offices and says, you know,
(10:27):
Rochfert thinks they're going to try to capture Port Moresby,
and he thinks they're going to do it with an
end run around New Guinea to attack this base on
the south coast of New Guinea, and they're going to
do it about the first week of May. We think, well,
that puts Nimitts in a spot. He now has to
decide what he's going to do about it. Nice to
(10:48):
know what the enemy may be planning, but what do
you do about it? Do you send your only surviving
aircraft carrier? Remember that one is in Bremerton undergoing a refit.
Two of them are off bombing Tokyo with Jimmy Doodle Doolittle.
That leads him one in the Coral Sea to try
(11:09):
to confront maybe two, maybe three, maybe more Japanese carriers.
But Nimitz decided that having advanced knowledge, if it proved true,
gave him an edge, and so he committed himself to
a Battle of the Coral Sea. And I think that
confirmed for him that when Layton came in and said,
Rochfort thinks something's going to happen, he needed to listen.
(11:32):
And that's, of course what happened a week later, when
Layton came in and said, Rochfort thinks the Japanese are
going to go after Midway.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Let's let's talk about this man, because you you already
referenced him ones and you've of course written a book
on him, right. But Nimits inherits this Pacific Area Command Post,
Pearl Harbor. Everything is a disaster. And one of the
things that you pick up on in the Toll book,
(12:03):
in your book, in Partial's book is the man clearly
had almost just ice in his veins. Fool headed, even
keel always able to just kind of see the bigger picture.
So even as ships are still smoldering around him, he's
(12:24):
able to see a little bit further on. So if
you would just a couple of minute.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Or yeah, I think the key here for Nimtsan, really
for any successful commander's temperament. You don't want somebody who's
going to pound the table and yell at his subordinates
and argue with his superiors and get in trouble with
his peers. He was a guy who could, as you suggest,
see the big picture, see it from thirty thousand feet,
(12:48):
and perhaps even more importantly, deal with others in a
way that allowed them to figure it out as well.
He didn't so much give orders, as explained to them
what he thought was going on, allowed them to suggest
what they thought, and then maybe say, you know, that's
a good idea we should do. That allowed them to
(13:08):
become participants in the decision making process. But whether he
had ice cold blood in his veins or he just
kept all that inside, I'm not really sure. It's hard
to say. He had those cool blue eyes and his
peers and subordinates would say, boy, when he looked at
you with those eyes, you know you felt yes, sir, yes, sir.
(13:33):
So he had something about his persona that people gave
people confidence that they could be successful. And I think
that was a force multiplier in the Pacific War. And
I can imagine any number of other high commanders that
we might think of, including Halsey and certainly including MacArthur,
(13:54):
who lacked that skill, that ability, that people managementacteristic that
allowed Nimetz to be so successful in his job.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
I think Nimits is one of those people that he
is the man of history, and he also makes it too.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (14:13):
So Nimes understands that there's a high probability that the
Japanese are going to strike midway. What does he do next?
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Well, that's the thing as in the Coral Sea. He
believes Rochfort. He thinks he's right, and the problem is
that he's lost one of his carriers in the Coral Sea,
the Lexington, the biggest of his carriers, went down and
was lost forever. In fact, it's wreck It went into
(14:43):
water so deep its wreckage wasn't discovered until about seven
years ago. In twenty eighteen, so it's gone, and the Yorktown,
which was the other carrier in the Coral Sea, had
been badly damaged, and it's limping back to Pearl Harbor,
trailing of ten mile long oil. The two carriers that
had gone off to bomb Tokyo with Jimmy dooit a little.
(15:05):
They're going to be available, but that gives them two
and if you count to Yorktown, maybe what two and
a half. But what Rochfort told him was that Japanese
were coming with four. So given the europe First strategy,
maybe the smart thing to do here is to let
the Japanese have Midway. It's a tiny little island. It's
(15:27):
not worth much out there in the middle of the Pacific,
and he knows that the Japanese are going to have
a hell of a time keeping it supplied three thousand
miles from Tokyo. American submarines could savage their supply ships.
The Japanese garrison there would wither on the vine. The
Americans probably take it back pretty easily. But his ace
in the hole, of course, is Rochfert's advanced knowledge that
(15:50):
this is likely to happen. It's going to happen in
the first week of June. We know they're coming, we
know where they're coming. So Nimetz decides, if I fix
New Yorktown real quick, patch it up, bubblegum and string
and get it out there. That gives me three carriers.
And there's an airstrip on Midway that's four airplane platforms,
(16:13):
and they're coming with four. That's four against four. And
I know they're coming.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
And one that can't be sunk. Party say again, and
one that can't be sunk.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Yeah, that's right, and of course can't maneuver either. But
there again, what are you gonna do? So I think
it's easy to underestimate the boldness of Chester Nimmts and
making that decision. You know, should he lose two, even
three of those carriers, the whole West coast of the
United States has opened up. Those carriers are the last
(16:47):
block between the Imperial Japanese Navy and the West Coast
of the United States. But Nimetz decides he can do it.
So he sends his carriers out early well in advance
of the Japanese approach to an ambush position. Now, remember
the Japanese plan is that they're going to attack Midway.
(17:07):
That will alert the Americans that there's danger, and only
then will they sore Tea with their carriers, and the
Japanese would ambush them. Instead, Nimitz turns that around, puts
his carriers well north of Midway in their own ambush position,
and he will pounce on the Japanese carriers when they
(17:28):
do attack Midway. But it is a very and it
works out. We all know, because we've read history. We
all know this is going to work. But it's don't
underestimate the boldness of making that decision. If he gets wrong,
not only does he make the whole West Coast vulnerable,
he certainly loses his job.
Speaker 4 (17:48):
Mid To Midway Island they you know, like you said,
it's a small atole, you know, and it's not, you know,
overly strategic. But this is the place that the Japanese
choose to strike. And it's only fascinating to me to
learn that Midway basically sent out communications that they were
out of fresh water. And yeah, and the and the
(18:08):
Japanese they see that and they're like, oh, I smell
blood in the water. And they're like no, no, no, no no
no no no no no no.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
Yeah, there's a long backstory to that, it's kind of interesting.
It has to do with the jealousy and rivalry between
the intelligence services in Washington, d C. Which were run
by two brothers, the Redmond brothers and according and they
were correct administratively. The way it's supposed to work was
that whatever intelligence was gathered, including what Rochfort was coming
(18:38):
up with, was supposed to be sent to Washington for
them to consider, for them to think about, to make
a decision, and then send operational orders back out two
nimits or whatever operational commander was involved. Instead of that
Rochfort and Layton, you know, shortcut the system. Rochfort told
(18:59):
Layton and told Nimts without going to Washington. So the
rednanm brothers in Washington were a little annoyed by this.
They said, well, how do you know? You don't really
know where they're going to attack, You're you're just guessing.
So the folks in Hypo, which is the code name
for the code breaking group, said all right, how can
(19:19):
we prove to these skeptics that they're idiots? I know here,
we'll do this. We will send a message by subterranean
cable so it can't be intercepted to Midway saying send
us a radio message that you're running out of freshwater,
that your desolemnization plans have broken down, you don't have
enough drinking water. And then we'll wait, And sure enough,
(19:41):
the codebreakers intercepted a Japanese radio message saying Midway is
short of water. There you go, I got it. We
figured it out. We know, we know where they're going
to strike. So it wasn't that that prompted Japanese to attack,
but it did confirm or the codebreakers what they already knew.
(20:03):
But it also allowed them to tell Washington, see, we
were right.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
That's got to be liberating, isn't it.
Speaker 5 (20:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
One of the things that you said about niemits was
that he didn't have to argue with his subordinates, and
he didn't bicker with his superiors. He certainly wasn't a
type to go before, say the Navy board, and threatened
to resign if he didn't get his way. Maybe like
someone else.
Speaker 6 (20:31):
Yeah, yeah, Without spending too too much time, what is
kind of the Japanese mindset the approach towards their offensive
at Midway?
Speaker 3 (20:42):
What you nailed it early on in the introduction, This
is Yamamoso you're looking at on the screen here, he said.
Oko Yamamoto was by all accounts a brilliant man who
was skeptical about going to war with the United States
in the first place. He'd served over here for two tours.
He knew what a dynamo the American industrial infrastructure was,
and he said, you know this. We can't beat these guys,
(21:05):
but if you want to try it, the only chance
we have is to take him out on the first day.
But he was vastly disappointed when Nagumo reported to him that, boy,
we took out their battleships. They are wrecked. And he said, well,
what about the carriers. Well, there were no carriers in
Pearl Harbor on December seventh, nineteen forty one. Now, those
(21:29):
who like conspiracy theories will tell you, ah see, now
we knew they were coming and we hid the carriers
from them. Not true at all. What happened was that
the Saratoga was in Bremerton on a long planned and
previously scheduled refit, the two active duty carriers that husband
Kimmel had. He got this war warning from Washington saying, defend,
(21:53):
do something to beef up the outer defenses of America
because we think Japan's going to strike within the next
two weeks, Well, what are the outer defenses Midway and Wake.
So Kimmel sends one carrier to each of those, along
with their supports in the task force, with a marine
air squadron to beef up the airplanes on both Wake
(22:17):
and Midway. Now, the one to Midway never got there,
turned around after they got the news of Pearl Harbor.
But the ones to Wake did get there, and they
played an important role in turning back the first Japanese
attack on Wake Island. So all three carriers were gone
from Pearl Harbor on December seventh, nineteen forty one, and
Yamamoto was devastated by that, and that's why and how
(22:41):
he hatched the Midway plan to lure those carriers out
into deep water by attacking Midway. Midway's Midway is not
really the target here. Midway is the bait. Attack Midway,
get the Americans to send out their carriers, pounce on them,
send them to the bottom, and then we own the Pacific.
(23:03):
It's not a terrible plan, but for the codebreakers.
Speaker 4 (23:08):
So can you kind of tell us a little bit
too about how the United States how how does Nimets
get the upper hand on the Japanese.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
At Midway At Midway, Well, there are books that will
tell you it was a matter of luck, providence, you know,
and so on. They can look at some of the
titles of the older books on Midway. Miracle at Midway,
for example, is the way one author describes it. And
you could take that point because of the way the
timing played out. But the key point was Nimts's decision
(23:43):
to put his task forces, his carrier task forces north
of Midway, literally in the last place the Japanese looked
for them. The Japanese sent out search planes. Of course,
they didn't really think it was going to be necessary.
They thought they knew where the care carriers were. They
were in Pearl Harbor. No, they weren't. But as it happened,
(24:07):
the Japanese did not cite either of the two carriers
under Spruance's command at all. They did spot the Yorktown,
but only after they had hit Midway with their first strike.
So that puts in Agumo in a tough spot. Here's
what he's got to think about. I bombed Midway. My
(24:27):
bomber commander tells me, I need a second strike. So
I could bring up my second strike with a high
explosive bombs and send them out, then recover the planes
coming back from Midway, rearm them with armor piercing weaponry,
so I can attack that carrier north of me. But
(24:49):
that's only with half of my force. Maybe what I
should do is recover the planes, re arm everybody, and
send off a massive strike against this carrier and get
the job done. Remember, getting the carriers, more than getting
midway is the most important objective here. So well, Nagumo
(25:09):
is trying to figure out the timing of this. The
American planes have already launched from their carriers and are
heading toward him. And there they are.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yeah, and we're talking about a mix of army and
navy because you've got army planes coming up off of Midway,
You've got fighters and dive bombers and torpedo bombers, and
you've got all this kind of mix of aircraft. And
this is before we've really unlocked the key to dog
(25:42):
fighting with the Japanese. So what's the the casualties look like,
what's the.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
Yeah, Actually, these are two separate attacks. The early attack,
the one that's launched from Midway, airstrip. That's the melange
of vindicators and B seven teens and all sorts of
other planes. I mean, as you say, it's a mishmash.
There's army, there's navy, there's a marine corps there, and
(26:09):
they're not really cooperating, and they attack. They find the
Japanese carriers and they attack them, and they're completely unsuccessful.
They don't land a glove on them, and they're all
let's say ninety percent, you can check that number. That
may not be exactly accurate, but the vast majority of
them are lost in this attack. And the Japanese admiral,
(26:32):
by now Nagumo was thinking, if this is the best
the Americans can do, I've got nothing to worry about.
So that first strike is a non starter. It doesn't
go anywhere. But it's the second strike, the one that
comes from the carriers, that is most effective. And here's
another place where luck and circumstance play a role. The
(26:54):
planes from the Hornet, which is commanded by Mark Pete Mitchell.
The planes from the Hornet do not fly to the
coordinates that had been reported by the scout planes. Mitchell
has convinced himself that the Japanese are operating in two groups,
as the Americans are. By the way that there are
two carriers that the coordinates reported and two more eighty
(27:18):
two one hundred miles behind them, and he says, I'm
going to get those two carriers. So instead of fly
ordering them to fly to the south west, he orders
them to fly west, and they fly right out of
the battle. They never see the Japanese, they never drop
a bomb, they never release a torpedo, they never fire
(27:39):
a shot, and they come back with all their ordinance attacks.
So for all the work that Nimitz did to get
three carriers out there, there are really only two involved
in this attack, and that's the Enterprise in the Yorktown
because the Hornet Air Group has flown itself out of
the battle.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
And those are under spruans.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
The two carriers that are under Spruance are the Enterprise
and the Hornet, and Spruance is the guy who decides
overruling his air boss by the way, that we need
to hit them early, and he orders the planes to
go now, don't wait, don't group up, go. But it's
Mitcheer on the Hornet who, instead of going in that direction,
(28:23):
sends his air group under a commander's Stansfield Ring off
to the west in what history has labeled the flight
to Nowhere.
Speaker 4 (28:36):
So after this first wave, you know, obviously, like you said,
it's a non starter. When the Japanese realize I guess
let me ask, when do the Japanese realize that they're
in trouble.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
Well, that's a great question because after that first failed attack,
the second attack comes from a wayward torpedo squadron from
the Hornet. This is a guy named Jack Waldron who
commanded the fifteen planes of Torpedo eight, who argued with Ring,
his air group commander, and said, I'm not going that way,
that's the wrong way. I'm going this way. He committed mutiny,
(29:14):
let's call it what it was, and he flew bline
toward the Japanese carriers, and in fact, all four carriers
were operating together. Mitchell was just wrong. So the first
American planes from the carriers to get there are these
fifteen torpedo bombers coming in without fighter protection, without support
(29:36):
from dive bombers, all by themselves, attacking this gigantic Japanese formation,
and as you might expect, all fifteen planes are shot down.
The contribution he makes and it's not on purpose. He
didn't say I will sacrifice myself to do this, But
the inadvertent contribution that he makes is that by attacking low,
(30:00):
as torpedo planes have to do, he drew the Japanese
combat Air Patrol the cap down from fifteen thousand feet
to about five hundred feet in order to shoot down
all those planes. And what that meant was at about
ten to fifteen minutes later, when the dive bombers arrived
(30:21):
from the Enterprise at fifteen thousand feet, there's no combat
control up there, so they can line up on the ships,
take their time, and lay those bombs right on the
flight deck, and in the next five minutes, the course
of the Second World War in the Pacific was flipped.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
See now, Bo, that's what I would call a turning point.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
Yes, it is definitely a turning point.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
This we have this long running argument. I am of
the opinion that there is no such thing as a
turning point except this. I'll give this all.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Right, and we got you way to go, Joe. That's there,
you go. I won one.
Speaker 4 (31:05):
I mean, it just blows my mind that in five
minutes time, you know, the might of the Japanese Imperial
Navy is in shambles. Yeah, and the Japanese are never
able to recover from this.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
Well, not completely. No, they do win the arguably they
win the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands during the
Guadalcanal campaign with their fighters are still excellent. But here's
the problem. I mean, their pilots are still excellent. But
the problem is instead of bringing them back to Japan
to educate the next group of future pilots, they keep
them on the front line and eventually they just lose
(31:42):
so many they're no longer competitive. The Americans do the opposite,
and this again is one of the things Nimitz did.
He took seventy pilots veterans of both Coral Sea and Midway,
and sent them back to the United States to be
air instructors. They instruct the next generation of pilots so
that by the time nineteen forty three comes around, not
(32:04):
only do we have more pilots, we have more experienced pilots,
we have better pilots, and quite frankly, by now we
have better airplanes.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
One of the things that I picked up on I
know Bow we talked about this way way back in
the old grad school days. You know, we did the
book on the codebreakers and everything else, and we eventually
got to talk about the fighting and everything that goes on.
Is that there's just immense, immense casualties suffered by the
(32:36):
torpedo bombers as they go in, and it just seems
like it's such a waste because they know that their
aircraft or not maybe necessarily the fastest and maybe necessarily
the most well armed and able to be exposed for
such a prolonged period.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Yeah, that's all fair. And yet of course there weren't
any pilots who said, I'm not doing that right. These
people raised their hand and said let me do it,
including a particular Geen Lindsay, who had suffered a horrible
accident just the day before and whose back was almost
literally broken. They had to lower him into his cockpit,
but he wasn't going to miss this. What they knew
(33:17):
was that the torpedo is the most effective ship killer.
Now in this battle, it's the dive bombers that do it.
The dive bombers because there were so many of them,
and they landed those bombs in just the right places
at just the right time to create several secondary explosions
inside the hangar deck. But a torpedo was a ship killer,
and if you could put a torpedo into a capital ship,
(33:40):
you had a better chance of sinking than you did
with even one thousand pound bomb. The problem is to
do that, you had to come in at about one
hundred feet, so you're down there, very low and visible
and vulnerable. You had to drop that torpedo at a
slow speed because if you were going too fast, the
impact of the torpedo on the water set off the
triggering mechanism. So you're coming in low and slow. It's
(34:05):
almost like saying shoot me. And so yes, the low.
Not only did all fifteen planes of torpedo eight were
lost in this battle, so too were most of the
torpedo planes from the other two carriers because they had
to come in low, they had to come in slow.
Of all of them, only four survived to get back
(34:27):
to the carriers.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
And I know this is this is a strange way
to go from that question to them saying this, But
I'm going to borrow from our friends James Hollin and
Al Murray, and they talk about the steel not flesh approach,
and that's just how the Allies win the war, steel
not flesh, use technology over men's lives. All that makes sense.
And then you can trast that maybe with the Japanese
(34:51):
carrier force, because one of the things that I've picked
up on the last couple of weeks in preparation for
this is while American crews practic just fire suppression techniques
and fire and damage control techniques, the Japanese focused more
on rearmament and trying to be as speedy and as
efficient with that as possible. Yeah, they abandon all of
(35:15):
the practices in the middle of this firefight. And while
the American carriers may be being hit and maybe being attacked,
and there could be you know, damage done to the
fuel tanks and everything, they're able to isolate that by
and large, and they're able to keep the ships moving
it and launching and reclaiming aircraft. And then the Japanese,
(35:38):
who leave an entire hangar deck full of explosive armed
ordinance fuel lines completely still full, while the American practices
to drain them as quick as possible.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Yeah, there are two things here. One is the timing,
and we mentioned this earlier, that Nagumo's decision to strike
the planes that were on the flight deck down to
the hangar deck, re arm refuel, shift over the ordinance,
take off, the explosive bombs, put on the armor piercing bombs,
and they don't have time to lower the explosive bombs
(36:13):
back down to the magazine, so they're just on racks
against the wall. So this is an accident waiting to happen.
That's part of it. But I think you touch on
what is really a bigger part of the issue, and
you're absolutely right. The Japanese culturally, and particularly the Japanese
army and Navy, had a view that it was a
warrior's job to kill the other guy. It's not a
(36:37):
warrior's job to protect yourself. It's not a warrior's job
to put self sealing fuel tanks on your airplane. It's
not a warrior's job to put armor around the cockpit.
It's not a warrior's job even to have a parachute,
because that assumes you're gonna need it. What we want
is for you to think not about how to save yourself.
(37:00):
I want you to think about how to kill the
other guy. Well, of course, on the American side, they
spend a lot of time on damage control, on self sealing,
fuel tanks, armor, armored cockpits. Of course, each pilot not
only has a parachute, he has a little raft to
get into if he's forced to abandon the aircraft. And
I think that that cultural view what is a warrior's job.
(37:23):
One of the key things you picked up on Joe
is that I think there's a dramatic difference in the
culture of the two sides. The warrior culture in Japan
held that it was a warrior's job to kill his opponent,
not to worry about defending himself. Why would he need
armor around his cockpit. Why would he need a parachute
(37:44):
for example, He's not going to need that. Make the
other guy use his parachute. And that mindset contributed to
heavy losses on the Japanese side early on in the war,
in nineteen forty two and nineteen forty three, when they
lost an airplane, they usually lost the air crew as well.
On the American side, if we lost an airplane, percent
(38:08):
of the time a destroyer would come out and pick
up the air crew. So that allowed the Americans to
have a longer role in this war than the Japanese did.
Speaker 4 (38:21):
Funnily, enough, one of the very first episodes, it's not
the first episode of Homebrew History, we had a guy
on that's a fellow colleague of Joey and I's, and
he gives a really good lecture titled Bushido Abandoned and
talking about the development of you know, the sort of
warrior culture and the abandonment of the ways of old,
you know, the ways of the samurai, and how you know,
(38:42):
militarism and nationalism really helped fuel this dark era of
Japanese history. But I do I do have this really
big question here, and I think this is a perfect
way to kind of wind down just a little bit here,
how exactly does the Japanese high con and deal with
(39:03):
the loss at Midway.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
Well, to get all you need to know about the
Japanese role in the Battle of Midway, you need to
read the book by John Parshall and Tully about Shattered Sword,
because they really cover this stuff great. But the short
version is that, of course the Japanese tried to keep
this as quiet as possible. They didn't want the public
to know, the Navy, didn't want the army to know.
There was such a rivalry between the Imperial Army and
(39:27):
the Imperial Navy that they were almost allies rather than
representing a single country. They finally did acknowledge some losses,
although not the size of the losses in the Battle
of Midway, so they tried to downplay it. They really
thought they could recover and achieve what they wanted. Remember
(39:47):
that their goal is not really to defeat the United
States the way we would think about defeating another country,
you know, compel their submission. What they hoped would happen
was that when when the Americans tried to fight their
way back across the Pacific, they would take such horrible
losses in doing so that at some point nineteen forty three,
(40:09):
forty four, forty five, forty six, forty seven, at some
point that Japanese would say, you know, I mean, excuse me.
The Americans would say, Oh my gosh, this costs too much.
It's too expensive, We've run out of patience, I've missed
the latest movie. Let's negotiate, and in that negotiation, the
Japanese would be allowed to keep most of what they'd
(40:31):
conquered in nineteen forty two. That was their plan, and
it really shows their misunderstanding of America as much as
it does American misunderstanding of the Japanese.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
Well, though, I think you know what time it is?
Speaker 7 (40:50):
Yes, it is about is that time?
Speaker 2 (40:54):
It is about that time? How about we run one?
Speaker 5 (41:00):
Here we go?
Speaker 4 (41:02):
Okay, So doctor Simon's what boohicky history is. It is
something that every historian hates, right, bad history. It's bad takes,
it is bad interpretations. It is something that is absolutely ridiculous.
It's boohicky, it's rubbish. There's something that people get wrong
about the Battle of Midway, whether it be a myth,
(41:24):
whether it be a misinterpretation. What is something about the
Battle of Midway that you want to dbook or set
the record straight.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
Well, it's not completely boo hicky, but I think the
idea that we won the Battle of Midway completely because
of luck. We were just lucky. It was a miracle
at Midway. My argument that I make in my book
is that at each decisive turning point in that battle
(41:56):
someone made a decision. Nimts had to decide to trust
his caad breakers and send that fleet out to the north.
That Spruance had to overrule his air boss and send
those bombers out. Early Wade McCluskey had to decide well,
there's nobody here at the coordinates I was given. I'll
(42:16):
just go back. No, he was going to conduct a
search and the product of that search was finding the enemy.
So yes, it seems providential. But I think the key
is appreciating and understanding the hard decisions made by the
commanders at the scene, by the seat of their pants
(42:37):
that led to the final American success. That would be
the biggest thing.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
That's a great point. And now there is this little
part of the show. We have this little tradition we
started all the way back very beginning. What is in
your cup? So we're just going to go around talking
about what we have in the old flasks tonight.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
Oh yeah, Well, you know you you mentioned in one
of your notes to me that you are interested in
the cocktail Nimits used to have before dinner every night.
I have the recipe which I'm willing to share with you,
which is if you are ready, Are your listeners ready?
You got a pencil, you guys, So here it comes.
(43:20):
You take a highball glass like this one, You put
a sugar cube in the bottom of it, and you
put two drops of angostura bitters on the sugar cube.
Then you put in just enough hot water to melt
the sugar. Then you fill the glass with crushed ice,
and you put in two jiggers of bourbon and top
(43:45):
it with one jigger of rum. Drink. That is a
powerful cocktail, my friend. I've had several of them, and
I did not have one before this conversation because I'd
be out of my chair. But but if you're not
going to drive, if you're staying home, if you just
(44:06):
want to leisurely evening, it goes down smoothly. I recommend it.
The sink pack.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
The sink pack. That's it.
Speaker 7 (44:15):
Yeah, nice drink, yoho yo bo. You'll be proud of me. Yes, well,
go ahead ask me what's in my cup?
Speaker 4 (44:25):
Is in your cup?
Speaker 2 (44:28):
For the first time in a very long time, A
little sip of Pusser's navy rum.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
I thought, you know what, let's go with the theme.
So there it is.
Speaker 3 (44:39):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Well how about yourself?
Speaker 4 (44:42):
I am actually drinking an Italian white wine Castillo de poggio.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
Oh sure, make make put us down we lower class burs.
Speaker 4 (44:53):
Well you have I know up folks.
Speaker 3 (44:59):
Bra Oh bravo, well done. I'm glad one of us has.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
Taste it took a little bit.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right.
Speaker 4 (45:09):
I'll tell you what my next drink is. Is this,
you know, Nimitz cocktail. I've got it written down and
I'm okay right now.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
You'll like it. It's good. But don't drive after or
for that matter, try to walk.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Always drink responsibly. There's the little picture there. You go,
all right again, folks. The book is The Battle of
Midway by doctor Craig Simons, and then the other one
is Shattered Sword by John Parshall and uh Anthony Tolly Anthony. Yeah,
be sure to have those on your shelf. There's any
(45:43):
last final thoughts for us?
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Oh for me? Mm hmm oh well, uh, I'll take
the opportunity to uh flog my newest book. How's that
please do? One of the things I wanted to do
after I finished the Nimics book was right about the
junior officers who actually fought the war, and so I
(46:07):
focused on the Naval Academy class of nineteen forty. It's
kind of a band of brothers. Go to see approach.
I follow these guys from their arrival at the Naval
Academy in the summer of nineteen thirty six. Follow them
through their academy years and then into the war through
the surrender on the deck of the Missouri in nineteen
forty five. So this is the book Annapolis Goes to
(46:30):
War the Naval Academy class of nineteen forty and it's
trial by fire in World War Two. It's just out.
It's out this month in fact.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
Wow, So here we go.
Speaker 4 (46:41):
You heard it here first.
Speaker 3 (46:42):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
There's a good old release for everyone.
Speaker 4 (46:46):
If you're not careful, we're going to have you back
on to talk about that book. Now.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
That would work, That would work, We can do that.
We can set that up.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
Okay, all right, but bo.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
I think I think this gets us for the first
little filler. Stick around. There is another part to this
little doubleheader on midway, and we'll be back with more
of that. And remember, if you are a listener, and
by being a listener, you can head over to the
buy Me a Coffee page drop down on the comment
section there, and for five dollars a month when we
do a series, you get the whole thing all but once,
(47:18):
and you get a little bit of advance access as well,
plus some kind of freebies that Bow and I throw
your way every now and again so be a listener,
help us, help the show keep things running. You know
who knew that podcasting cost money and you barely ever
come out on top. But here we are Doctor Simon's
again a pleasure bow as always a joy. Until next time, folks, cheers.
Speaker 5 (47:41):
We'll see night.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
Whole crew, that Cole crew talking about puddle crew.
Speaker 4 (48:11):
Everybody need pumble
M talking about everybody again, we're talking Midway.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
That long last and not the movie either of them. Yes,
well maybe it could come up. Who knows, that might
who knows. Maybe there's a surprise, Maybe there's a surprise.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Bo.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
This has been a long time coming. We were kind
of talking pre show and earlier this week is this
has been one that we've been pretty excited about, this
little two parter on the on the Battle of Midway.
So I'm I'm really excited to dive into it. You know,
it's it's one of those things that I feel like
gets talked about so much. And our problem is we're
(01:08):
very European centric when it comes to World War Two.
Maybe the reason we never touched Midway before was that,
you know, all of our guests were British historians talking
about Britain and World War Two, and you know, a
British fleet, save for some you know, escort actions and
(01:29):
working with the US Navy out in the Pacific, they
kind of don't pop up too too much.
Speaker 4 (01:33):
Out to be fair, the Allies also were a Germany first.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
And we're Germany first podcast.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
You know, so you know, hey, I guess we weren't
or are have been I suppose, but we're here to
rectify that.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Just a little bit, just for a couple of nights,
only two nights.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
On me.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
It's like, come see the rat Pack live at the sand.
But I think before we get started, we'll jump in
do a little commercial break, and then we'll come right
back and we'll get started with our guests and talk
a bit about midway.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
You don't want to miss it, Come on back.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Welcome back to Homebrew History. It is Boe and Joe
and we are joined tonight by the historian emeritus of
the Naval War College, I would argue, probably one of
the finest naval historians of our time. And I actually
got my start knowing doctor Craig Simon's knowing his work
(02:59):
through the Americans Civil War because he wrote a biography
of General Patrick Clayburne, who has of course killed at
the Battle of Franklin, where I worked for. You know,
I think anybody who listened to the show knows I
worked there for too long maybe, but that's how I
got started with him. And then of course Sam was like, oh, yeah,
(03:19):
you know, you ought to read some of Craig's books,
and I was like, oh yeah, I guess I should,
I should, I should, So then I did and it
turns out excellent. So, without further ado, and before I
continue to embarrass the show by all of our flattery,
let's go ahead and bring on doctor Craig.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Simon's good evening, silas.
Speaker 4 (03:43):
Well.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
I again, it's a pleasure to talk with you about
about you know, I would say that there are two
books on Midway that everyone should read. One of them
is Shattered Sword by John Parshall, and then the other
one is uh oh goodness there it is The Battle
of Midway by Craig.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Simons, and I agree with that too.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Have another one. Do you have any other recommendations.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
On Midway in particular? Yeah, now those are the two.
If you've got that, you've got it.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
Those are the two pillars.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah, I would say. I would say Ian Tols trilogy.
His coverage of Midway was really exciting.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Yeah, well, let me eat. In your introduction you mentioned
that the British don't pay a lot of attention to
the Pacific Theater, and that's true enough, but I will
tell this story, and that is that when I was
teaching at the British Naval Academy in nineteen ninety four
ninety five, as a visiting professor, I was teaching of
course on strategy to the young midshipman, and I decided
(04:48):
they needed to hear about midway, and I told the
story and I laid it out and the decision making
process and what ensued, and the faculty there decided it
was so useful to the student who talked about it
all week that they made it a permanent part of
the curriculum. So if they didn't talk about it before,
apparently they do.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Now that's how you leave a lasting impression, right there.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
I hope.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
So, so, Bo, let's get started with our conversation, because
I think what we're going to do is make this
have a two part episode. We're going to do one
episode right now with Doctor Sims. We've got another one
coming up with Sam Cavell, and I think the two
will kind of balance one another pretty well. But let's
talk a little bit about what's going on with the
(05:34):
US Navy, say December eighth, nineteen forty one until June
nineteen forty two.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Yeah, I can do that in about thirty seconds. No. No,
you're absolutely right to point out that the overall strategy,
which had been agreed upon even before Pearl Harbor in
Washington by the American and British heads of services, was
that Germany was by far the more dangerous opponent, the
much larger GDP. They were more, they already occupied half
(06:04):
of Europe. So the thing to do if the United
States got into this war, the thing to do was
to concentrate on Germany first. And that became kind of
a mantra Germany first, We're gonna do Germany first. But
here's the wrinkle to that. Ernest J. King, who was
the Chief of Naval Operations, who took the title cominch
(06:27):
as Commander in chief of the US Fleet, so in
effect wearing two hats. Ernie King decided, you know, if
we do that, if we focus exclusively on Europe, the
Japanese are going to be able to build up their
defenses in the Pacific to such a point that when
we do finally go after them, it'll cost more, it'll
(06:47):
take longer. We need to do something in the Pacific,
something aggressive in the Pacific, something to keep them back
on their heels. So that's one factor. The other factor
is that it became very clear within days of Pearl
Harbor that even though the United States was eager to
fulfill the Germany First plan. We simply didn't have the
(07:11):
wherewithal to do it. We had a tiny little army,
and even if we said, yes, let's invade as soon
as possible, that invasion would have taken place mostly by
British and Canadians. And you know, it's a hard argument
to make that you guys should go do that. So
the combination of King's eagerness to get into the war
(07:33):
in the Pacific and the inability of the English speaking
allies to do really anything serious in nineteen forty two
is what led to not just Germany First, but Germany
and Japan at the same time.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
That's incredibly interesting too, And obviously we kind of hinted
at it a little bit because we know that the
Americans had broke in the Japanese codes, and that kind
of gives, you know, especially minutes, a fore warning that
something is going to happen at midway. And correct me
(08:13):
if I'm wrong, but this was midway at least was
you know, in the thoughts of Yamamoto to at least
strike at the United States's aircraft carriers, that's correct, which
arguably had become more important than the you know, First
World War era dreadnought but Yaomoto knew that. Yeah, but yeah,
can you kind of elaborate a little bit wrong?
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
Let me say something about the codebreakers first, because I
think that's a crucial point that a lot of people misunderstand.
In this way, it is true that a team of
about between eighteen and twenty four dedicated to junior officers
and enlisted men, headed by Lieutenant Commander Joe Rocher, labored
literally around the clock in two air conditioned basement offices
(09:00):
beneath the district headquarters in Hauahu, and hard work led
them to be able to break tiny little pieces of
Japanese radio messages. And I remember there are thousands of these,
thousands of messages coming in all the time. They have
to decide one which ones are going to try to break,
two which parts of them they could break, and then
(09:24):
try to find repeated indications that maybe this means something.
So I want to emphasize them when we say we
broke their codes, that does not mean we're reading their
mail in real time. It means we could winkle out
little pieces of what it looked like they might be
thinking about doing. And that made it hard for the
(09:45):
people in Washington in particular to say, oh, well, well,
now we know what they're going to do. And a
lot of the credit goes to Nimts. Chester Nimmitz, about
whom I wrote a book so I am not entirely unprejudiced,
left a lot of that to Chester. Nim to trust
both Rochfort and his intelligence Bran Nimitz's own intelligence officer,
(10:07):
Edwin Layton, that these little bits of information did in
fact mean that Japanese were going to do this. Now,
now he had a check on this in the Coral Sea.
Remember in May, or first week of May of nineteen
forty two, Lighton came into Nimitz's offices and says, you know,
(10:27):
Rochfert thinks they're going to try to capture Port Moresby,
and he thinks they're going to do it with an
end run around New Guinea to attack this base on
the south coast of New Guinea, and they're going to
do it about the first week of May. We think, well,
that puts Nimitts in a spot. He now has to
decide what he's going to do about it. Nice to
(10:48):
know what the enemy may be planning, but what do
you do about it? Do you send your only surviving
aircraft carrier? Remember that one is in Bremerton undergoing a refit.
Two of them are off bombing Tokyo with Jimmy Doodle Doolittle.
That leads him one in the Coral Sea to try
(11:09):
to confront maybe two, maybe three, maybe more Japanese carriers.
But Nimitz decided that having advanced knowledge, if it proved true,
gave him an edge, and so he committed himself to
a Battle of the Coral Sea. And I think that
confirmed for him that when Layton came in and said,
Rochfort thinks something's going to happen, he needed to listen.
(11:32):
And that's, of course what happened a week later, when
Layton came in and said, Rochfort thinks the Japanese are
going to go after Midway.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Let's let's talk about this man, because you you already
referenced him ones and you've of course written a book
on him, right. But Nimits inherits this Pacific Area Command Post,
Pearl Harbor. Everything is a disaster. And one of the
things that you pick up on in the Toll book,
(12:03):
in your book, in Partial's book is the man clearly
had almost just ice in his veins. Fool headed, even
keel always able to just kind of see the bigger picture.
So even as ships are still smoldering around him, he's
(12:24):
able to see a little bit further on. So if
you would just a couple of minute.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Or yeah, I think the key here for Nimtsan, really
for any successful commander's temperament. You don't want somebody who's
going to pound the table and yell at his subordinates
and argue with his superiors and get in trouble with
his peers. He was a guy who could, as you suggest,
see the big picture, see it from thirty thousand feet,
(12:48):
and perhaps even more importantly, deal with others in a
way that allowed them to figure it out as well.
He didn't so much give orders, as explained to them
what he thought was going on, allowed them to suggest
what they thought, and then maybe say, you know, that's
a good idea we should do. That allowed them to
(13:08):
become participants in the decision making process. But whether he
had ice cold blood in his veins or he just
kept all that inside, I'm not really sure. It's hard
to say. He had those cool blue eyes and his
peers and subordinates would say, boy, when he looked at
you with those eyes, you know you felt yes, sir, yes, sir.
(13:33):
So he had something about his persona that people gave
people confidence that they could be successful. And I think
that was a force multiplier in the Pacific War. And
I can imagine any number of other high commanders that
we might think of, including Halsey and certainly including MacArthur,
(13:54):
who lacked that skill, that ability, that people managementacteristic that
allowed Nimetz to be so successful in his job.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
I think Nimits is one of those people that he
is the man of history, and he also makes it too.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (14:13):
So Nimes understands that there's a high probability that the
Japanese are going to strike midway. What does he do next?
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Well, that's the thing as in the Coral Sea. He
believes Rochfort. He thinks he's right, and the problem is
that he's lost one of his carriers in the Coral Sea,
the Lexington, the biggest of his carriers, went down and
was lost forever. In fact, it's wreck It went into
(14:43):
water so deep its wreckage wasn't discovered until about seven
years ago. In twenty eighteen, so it's gone, and the Yorktown,
which was the other carrier in the Coral Sea, had
been badly damaged, and it's limping back to Pearl Harbor,
trailing of ten mile long oil. The two carriers that
had gone off to bomb Tokyo with Jimmy dooit a little.
(15:05):
They're going to be available, but that gives them two
and if you count to Yorktown, maybe what two and
a half. But what Rochfort told him was that Japanese
were coming with four. So given the europe First strategy,
maybe the smart thing to do here is to let
the Japanese have Midway. It's a tiny little island. It's
(15:27):
not worth much out there in the middle of the Pacific,
and he knows that the Japanese are going to have
a hell of a time keeping it supplied three thousand
miles from Tokyo. American submarines could savage their supply ships.
The Japanese garrison there would wither on the vine. The
Americans probably take it back pretty easily. But his ace
in the hole, of course, is Rochfert's advanced knowledge that
(15:50):
this is likely to happen. It's going to happen in
the first week of June. We know they're coming, we
know where they're coming. So Nimetz decides, if I fix
New Yorktown real quick, patch it up, bubblegum and string
and get it out there. That gives me three carriers.
And there's an airstrip on Midway that's four airplane platforms,
(16:13):
and they're coming with four. That's four against four. And
I know they're coming.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
And one that can't be sunk. Party say again, and
one that can't be sunk.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Yeah, that's right, and of course can't maneuver either. But
there again, what are you gonna do? So I think
it's easy to underestimate the boldness of Chester Nimmts and
making that decision. You know, should he lose two, even
three of those carriers, the whole West coast of the
United States has opened up. Those carriers are the last
(16:47):
block between the Imperial Japanese Navy and the West Coast
of the United States. But Nimetz decides he can do it.
So he sends his carriers out early well in advance
of the Japanese approach to an ambush position. Now, remember
the Japanese plan is that they're going to attack Midway.
(17:07):
That will alert the Americans that there's danger, and only
then will they sore Tea with their carriers, and the
Japanese would ambush them. Instead, Nimitz turns that around, puts
his carriers well north of Midway in their own ambush position,
and he will pounce on the Japanese carriers when they
(17:28):
do attack Midway. But it is a very and it
works out. We all know, because we've read history. We
all know this is going to work. But it's don't
underestimate the boldness of making that decision. If he gets wrong,
not only does he make the whole West Coast vulnerable,
he certainly loses his job.
Speaker 4 (17:48):
Mid To Midway Island they you know, like you said,
it's a small atole, you know, and it's not, you know,
overly strategic. But this is the place that the Japanese
choose to strike. And it's only fascinating to me to
learn that Midway basically sent out communications that they were
out of fresh water. And yeah, and the and the
(18:08):
Japanese they see that and they're like, oh, I smell
blood in the water. And they're like no, no, no, no no
no no no no no no.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
Yeah, there's a long backstory to that, it's kind of interesting.
It has to do with the jealousy and rivalry between
the intelligence services in Washington, d C. Which were run
by two brothers, the Redmond brothers and according and they
were correct administratively. The way it's supposed to work was
that whatever intelligence was gathered, including what Rochfort was coming
(18:38):
up with, was supposed to be sent to Washington for
them to consider, for them to think about, to make
a decision, and then send operational orders back out two
nimits or whatever operational commander was involved. Instead of that
Rochfort and Layton, you know, shortcut the system. Rochfort told
(18:59):
Layton and told Nimts without going to Washington. So the
rednanm brothers in Washington were a little annoyed by this.
They said, well, how do you know? You don't really
know where they're going to attack, You're you're just guessing.
So the folks in Hypo, which is the code name
for the code breaking group, said all right, how can
(19:19):
we prove to these skeptics that they're idiots? I know here,
we'll do this. We will send a message by subterranean
cable so it can't be intercepted to Midway saying send
us a radio message that you're running out of freshwater,
that your desolemnization plans have broken down, you don't have
enough drinking water. And then we'll wait, And sure enough,
(19:41):
the codebreakers intercepted a Japanese radio message saying Midway is
short of water. There you go, I got it. We
figured it out. We know, we know where they're going
to strike. So it wasn't that that prompted Japanese to attack,
but it did confirm or the codebreakers what they already knew.
(20:03):
But it also allowed them to tell Washington, see, we
were right.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
That's got to be liberating, isn't it.
Speaker 5 (20:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
One of the things that you said about niemits was
that he didn't have to argue with his subordinates, and
he didn't bicker with his superiors. He certainly wasn't a
type to go before, say the Navy board, and threatened
to resign if he didn't get his way. Maybe like
someone else.
Speaker 6 (20:31):
Yeah, yeah, Without spending too too much time, what is
kind of the Japanese mindset the approach towards their offensive
at Midway?
Speaker 3 (20:42):
What you nailed it early on in the introduction, This
is Yamamoso you're looking at on the screen here, he said.
Oko Yamamoto was by all accounts a brilliant man who
was skeptical about going to war with the United States
in the first place. He'd served over here for two tours.
He knew what a dynamo the American industrial infrastructure was,
and he said, you know this. We can't beat these guys,
(21:05):
but if you want to try it, the only chance
we have is to take him out on the first day.
But he was vastly disappointed when Nagumo reported to him that, boy,
we took out their battleships. They are wrecked. And he said, well,
what about the carriers. Well, there were no carriers in
Pearl Harbor on December seventh, nineteen forty one. Now, those
(21:29):
who like conspiracy theories will tell you, ah see, now
we knew they were coming and we hid the carriers
from them. Not true at all. What happened was that
the Saratoga was in Bremerton on a long planned and
previously scheduled refit, the two active duty carriers that husband
Kimmel had. He got this war warning from Washington saying, defend,
(21:53):
do something to beef up the outer defenses of America
because we think Japan's going to strike within the next
two weeks, Well, what are the outer defenses Midway and Wake.
So Kimmel sends one carrier to each of those, along
with their supports in the task force, with a marine
air squadron to beef up the airplanes on both Wake
(22:17):
and Midway. Now, the one to Midway never got there,
turned around after they got the news of Pearl Harbor.
But the ones to Wake did get there, and they
played an important role in turning back the first Japanese
attack on Wake Island. So all three carriers were gone
from Pearl Harbor on December seventh, nineteen forty one, and
Yamamoto was devastated by that, and that's why and how
(22:41):
he hatched the Midway plan to lure those carriers out
into deep water by attacking Midway. Midway's Midway is not
really the target here. Midway is the bait. Attack Midway,
get the Americans to send out their carriers, pounce on them,
send them to the bottom, and then we own the Pacific.
(23:03):
It's not a terrible plan, but for the codebreakers.
Speaker 4 (23:08):
So can you kind of tell us a little bit
too about how the United States how how does Nimets
get the upper hand on the Japanese.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
At Midway At Midway, Well, there are books that will
tell you it was a matter of luck, providence, you know,
and so on. They can look at some of the
titles of the older books on Midway. Miracle at Midway,
for example, is the way one author describes it. And
you could take that point because of the way the
timing played out. But the key point was Nimts's decision
(23:43):
to put his task forces, his carrier task forces north
of Midway, literally in the last place the Japanese looked
for them. The Japanese sent out search planes. Of course,
they didn't really think it was going to be necessary.
They thought they knew where the care carriers were. They
were in Pearl Harbor. No, they weren't. But as it happened,
(24:07):
the Japanese did not cite either of the two carriers
under Spruance's command at all. They did spot the Yorktown,
but only after they had hit Midway with their first strike.
So that puts in Agumo in a tough spot. Here's
what he's got to think about. I bombed Midway. My
(24:27):
bomber commander tells me, I need a second strike. So
I could bring up my second strike with a high
explosive bombs and send them out, then recover the planes
coming back from Midway, rearm them with armor piercing weaponry,
so I can attack that carrier north of me. But
(24:49):
that's only with half of my force. Maybe what I
should do is recover the planes, re arm everybody, and
send off a massive strike against this carrier and get
the job done. Remember, getting the carriers, more than getting
midway is the most important objective here. So well, Nagumo
(25:09):
is trying to figure out the timing of this. The
American planes have already launched from their carriers and are
heading toward him. And there they are.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yeah, and we're talking about a mix of army and
navy because you've got army planes coming up off of Midway,
You've got fighters and dive bombers and torpedo bombers, and
you've got all this kind of mix of aircraft. And
this is before we've really unlocked the key to dog
(25:42):
fighting with the Japanese. So what's the the casualties look like,
what's the.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
Yeah, Actually, these are two separate attacks. The early attack,
the one that's launched from Midway, airstrip. That's the melange
of vindicators and B seven teens and all sorts of
other planes. I mean, as you say, it's a mishmash.
There's army, there's navy, there's a marine corps there, and
(26:09):
they're not really cooperating, and they attack. They find the
Japanese carriers and they attack them, and they're completely unsuccessful.
They don't land a glove on them, and they're all
let's say ninety percent, you can check that number. That
may not be exactly accurate, but the vast majority of
them are lost in this attack. And the Japanese admiral,
(26:32):
by now Nagumo was thinking, if this is the best
the Americans can do, I've got nothing to worry about.
So that first strike is a non starter. It doesn't
go anywhere. But it's the second strike, the one that
comes from the carriers, that is most effective. And here's
another place where luck and circumstance play a role. The
(26:54):
planes from the Hornet, which is commanded by Mark Pete Mitchell.
The planes from the Hornet do not fly to the
coordinates that had been reported by the scout planes. Mitchell
has convinced himself that the Japanese are operating in two groups,
as the Americans are. By the way that there are
two carriers that the coordinates reported and two more eighty
(27:18):
two one hundred miles behind them, and he says, I'm
going to get those two carriers. So instead of fly
ordering them to fly to the south west, he orders
them to fly west, and they fly right out of
the battle. They never see the Japanese, they never drop
a bomb, they never release a torpedo, they never fire
(27:39):
a shot, and they come back with all their ordinance attacks.
So for all the work that Nimitz did to get
three carriers out there, there are really only two involved
in this attack, and that's the Enterprise in the Yorktown
because the Hornet Air Group has flown itself out of
the battle.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
And those are under spruans.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
The two carriers that are under Spruance are the Enterprise
and the Hornet, and Spruance is the guy who decides
overruling his air boss by the way, that we need
to hit them early, and he orders the planes to
go now, don't wait, don't group up, go. But it's
Mitcheer on the Hornet who, instead of going in that direction,
(28:23):
sends his air group under a commander's Stansfield Ring off
to the west in what history has labeled the flight
to Nowhere.
Speaker 4 (28:36):
So after this first wave, you know, obviously, like you said,
it's a non starter. When the Japanese realize I guess
let me ask, when do the Japanese realize that they're
in trouble.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
Well, that's a great question because after that first failed attack,
the second attack comes from a wayward torpedo squadron from
the Hornet. This is a guy named Jack Waldron who
commanded the fifteen planes of Torpedo eight, who argued with Ring,
his air group commander, and said, I'm not going that way,
that's the wrong way. I'm going this way. He committed mutiny,
(29:14):
let's call it what it was, and he flew bline
toward the Japanese carriers, and in fact, all four carriers
were operating together. Mitchell was just wrong. So the first
American planes from the carriers to get there are these
fifteen torpedo bombers coming in without fighter protection, without support
(29:36):
from dive bombers, all by themselves, attacking this gigantic Japanese formation,
and as you might expect, all fifteen planes are shot down.
The contribution he makes and it's not on purpose. He
didn't say I will sacrifice myself to do this, But
the inadvertent contribution that he makes is that by attacking low,
(30:00):
as torpedo planes have to do, he drew the Japanese
combat Air Patrol the cap down from fifteen thousand feet
to about five hundred feet in order to shoot down
all those planes. And what that meant was at about
ten to fifteen minutes later, when the dive bombers arrived
(30:21):
from the Enterprise at fifteen thousand feet, there's no combat
control up there, so they can line up on the ships,
take their time, and lay those bombs right on the
flight deck, and in the next five minutes, the course
of the Second World War in the Pacific was flipped.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
See now, Bo, that's what I would call a turning point.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
Yes, it is definitely a turning point.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
This we have this long running argument. I am of
the opinion that there is no such thing as a
turning point except this. I'll give this all.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Right, and we got you way to go, Joe. That's there,
you go. I won one.
Speaker 4 (31:05):
I mean, it just blows my mind that in five
minutes time, you know, the might of the Japanese Imperial
Navy is in shambles. Yeah, and the Japanese are never
able to recover from this.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
Well, not completely. No, they do win the arguably they
win the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands during the
Guadalcanal campaign with their fighters are still excellent. But here's
the problem. I mean, their pilots are still excellent. But
the problem is instead of bringing them back to Japan
to educate the next group of future pilots, they keep
them on the front line and eventually they just lose
(31:42):
so many they're no longer competitive. The Americans do the opposite,
and this again is one of the things Nimitz did.
He took seventy pilots veterans of both Coral Sea and Midway,
and sent them back to the United States to be
air instructors. They instruct the next generation of pilots so
that by the time nineteen forty three comes around, not
(32:04):
only do we have more pilots, we have more experienced pilots,
we have better pilots, and quite frankly, by now we
have better airplanes.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
One of the things that I picked up on I
know Bow we talked about this way way back in
the old grad school days. You know, we did the
book on the codebreakers and everything else, and we eventually
got to talk about the fighting and everything that goes on.
Is that there's just immense, immense casualties suffered by the
(32:36):
torpedo bombers as they go in, and it just seems
like it's such a waste because they know that their
aircraft or not maybe necessarily the fastest and maybe necessarily
the most well armed and able to be exposed for
such a prolonged period.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Yeah, that's all fair. And yet of course there weren't
any pilots who said, I'm not doing that right. These
people raised their hand and said let me do it,
including a particular Geen Lindsay, who had suffered a horrible
accident just the day before and whose back was almost
literally broken. They had to lower him into his cockpit,
but he wasn't going to miss this. What they knew
(33:17):
was that the torpedo is the most effective ship killer.
Now in this battle, it's the dive bombers that do it.
The dive bombers because there were so many of them,
and they landed those bombs in just the right places
at just the right time to create several secondary explosions
inside the hangar deck. But a torpedo was a ship killer,
and if you could put a torpedo into a capital ship,
(33:40):
you had a better chance of sinking than you did
with even one thousand pound bomb. The problem is to
do that, you had to come in at about one
hundred feet, so you're down there, very low and visible
and vulnerable. You had to drop that torpedo at a
slow speed because if you were going too fast, the
impact of the torpedo on the water set off the
triggering mechanism. So you're coming in low and slow. It's
(34:05):
almost like saying shoot me. And so yes, the low.
Not only did all fifteen planes of torpedo eight were
lost in this battle, so too were most of the
torpedo planes from the other two carriers because they had
to come in low, they had to come in slow.
Of all of them, only four survived to get back
(34:27):
to the carriers.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
And I know this is this is a strange way
to go from that question to them saying this, But
I'm going to borrow from our friends James Hollin and
Al Murray, and they talk about the steel not flesh approach,
and that's just how the Allies win the war, steel
not flesh, use technology over men's lives. All that makes sense.
And then you can trast that maybe with the Japanese
(34:51):
carrier force, because one of the things that I've picked
up on the last couple of weeks in preparation for
this is while American crews practic just fire suppression techniques
and fire and damage control techniques, the Japanese focused more
on rearmament and trying to be as speedy and as
efficient with that as possible. Yeah, they abandon all of
(35:15):
the practices in the middle of this firefight. And while
the American carriers may be being hit and maybe being attacked,
and there could be you know, damage done to the
fuel tanks and everything, they're able to isolate that by
and large, and they're able to keep the ships moving
it and launching and reclaiming aircraft. And then the Japanese,
(35:38):
who leave an entire hangar deck full of explosive armed
ordinance fuel lines completely still full, while the American practices
to drain them as quick as possible.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Yeah, there are two things here. One is the timing,
and we mentioned this earlier, that Nagumo's decision to strike
the planes that were on the flight deck down to
the hangar deck, re arm refuel, shift over the ordinance,
take off, the explosive bombs, put on the armor piercing bombs,
and they don't have time to lower the explosive bombs
(36:13):
back down to the magazine, so they're just on racks
against the wall. So this is an accident waiting to happen.
That's part of it. But I think you touch on
what is really a bigger part of the issue, and
you're absolutely right. The Japanese culturally, and particularly the Japanese
army and Navy, had a view that it was a
warrior's job to kill the other guy. It's not a
(36:37):
warrior's job to protect yourself. It's not a warrior's job
to put self sealing fuel tanks on your airplane. It's
not a warrior's job to put armor around the cockpit.
It's not a warrior's job even to have a parachute,
because that assumes you're gonna need it. What we want
is for you to think not about how to save yourself.
(37:00):
I want you to think about how to kill the
other guy. Well, of course, on the American side, they
spend a lot of time on damage control, on self sealing,
fuel tanks, armor, armored cockpits. Of course, each pilot not
only has a parachute, he has a little raft to
get into if he's forced to abandon the aircraft. And
I think that that cultural view what is a warrior's job.
(37:23):
One of the key things you picked up on Joe
is that I think there's a dramatic difference in the
culture of the two sides. The warrior culture in Japan
held that it was a warrior's job to kill his opponent,
not to worry about defending himself. Why would he need
armor around his cockpit. Why would he need a parachute
(37:44):
for example, He's not going to need that. Make the
other guy use his parachute. And that mindset contributed to
heavy losses on the Japanese side early on in the war,
in nineteen forty two and nineteen forty three, when they
lost an airplane, they usually lost the air crew as well.
On the American side, if we lost an airplane, percent
(38:08):
of the time a destroyer would come out and pick
up the air crew. So that allowed the Americans to
have a longer role in this war than the Japanese did.
Speaker 4 (38:21):
Funnily, enough, one of the very first episodes, it's not
the first episode of Homebrew History, we had a guy
on that's a fellow colleague of Joey and I's, and
he gives a really good lecture titled Bushido Abandoned and
talking about the development of you know, the sort of
warrior culture and the abandonment of the ways of old,
you know, the ways of the samurai, and how you know,
(38:42):
militarism and nationalism really helped fuel this dark era of
Japanese history. But I do I do have this really
big question here, and I think this is a perfect
way to kind of wind down just a little bit here,
how exactly does the Japanese high con and deal with
(39:03):
the loss at Midway.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
Well, to get all you need to know about the
Japanese role in the Battle of Midway, you need to
read the book by John Parshall and Tully about Shattered Sword,
because they really cover this stuff great. But the short
version is that, of course the Japanese tried to keep
this as quiet as possible. They didn't want the public
to know, the Navy, didn't want the army to know.
There was such a rivalry between the Imperial Army and
(39:27):
the Imperial Navy that they were almost allies rather than
representing a single country. They finally did acknowledge some losses,
although not the size of the losses in the Battle
of Midway, so they tried to downplay it. They really
thought they could recover and achieve what they wanted. Remember
(39:47):
that their goal is not really to defeat the United
States the way we would think about defeating another country,
you know, compel their submission. What they hoped would happen
was that when when the Americans tried to fight their
way back across the Pacific, they would take such horrible
losses in doing so that at some point nineteen forty three,
(40:09):
forty four, forty five, forty six, forty seven, at some
point that Japanese would say, you know, I mean, excuse me.
The Americans would say, Oh my gosh, this costs too much.
It's too expensive, We've run out of patience, I've missed
the latest movie. Let's negotiate, and in that negotiation, the
Japanese would be allowed to keep most of what they'd
(40:31):
conquered in nineteen forty two. That was their plan, and
it really shows their misunderstanding of America as much as
it does American misunderstanding of the Japanese.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
Well, though, I think you know what time it is?
Speaker 7 (40:50):
Yes, it is about is that time?
Speaker 2 (40:54):
It is about that time? How about we run one?
Speaker 5 (41:00):
Here we go?
Speaker 4 (41:02):
Okay, So doctor Simon's what boohicky history is. It is
something that every historian hates, right, bad history. It's bad takes,
it is bad interpretations. It is something that is absolutely ridiculous.
It's boohicky, it's rubbish. There's something that people get wrong
about the Battle of Midway, whether it be a myth,
(41:24):
whether it be a misinterpretation. What is something about the
Battle of Midway that you want to dbook or set
the record straight.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
Well, it's not completely boo hicky, but I think the
idea that we won the Battle of Midway completely because
of luck. We were just lucky. It was a miracle
at Midway. My argument that I make in my book
is that at each decisive turning point in that battle
(41:56):
someone made a decision. Nimts had to decide to trust
his caad breakers and send that fleet out to the north.
That Spruance had to overrule his air boss and send
those bombers out. Early Wade McCluskey had to decide well,
there's nobody here at the coordinates I was given. I'll
(42:16):
just go back. No, he was going to conduct a
search and the product of that search was finding the enemy.
So yes, it seems providential. But I think the key
is appreciating and understanding the hard decisions made by the
commanders at the scene, by the seat of their pants
(42:37):
that led to the final American success. That would be
the biggest thing.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
That's a great point. And now there is this little
part of the show. We have this little tradition we
started all the way back very beginning. What is in
your cup? So we're just going to go around talking
about what we have in the old flasks tonight.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
Oh yeah, Well, you know you you mentioned in one
of your notes to me that you are interested in
the cocktail Nimits used to have before dinner every night.
I have the recipe which I'm willing to share with you,
which is if you are ready, Are your listeners ready?
You got a pencil, you guys, So here it comes.
(43:20):
You take a highball glass like this one, You put
a sugar cube in the bottom of it, and you
put two drops of angostura bitters on the sugar cube.
Then you put in just enough hot water to melt
the sugar. Then you fill the glass with crushed ice,
and you put in two jiggers of bourbon and top
(43:45):
it with one jigger of rum. Drink. That is a
powerful cocktail, my friend. I've had several of them, and
I did not have one before this conversation because I'd
be out of my chair. But but if you're not
going to drive, if you're staying home, if you just
(44:06):
want to leisurely evening, it goes down smoothly. I recommend it.
The sink pack.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
The sink pack. That's it.
Speaker 7 (44:15):
Yeah, nice drink, yoho yo bo. You'll be proud of me. Yes, well,
go ahead ask me what's in my cup?
Speaker 4 (44:25):
Is in your cup?
Speaker 2 (44:28):
For the first time in a very long time, A
little sip of Pusser's navy rum.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
I thought, you know what, let's go with the theme.
So there it is.
Speaker 3 (44:39):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Well how about yourself?
Speaker 4 (44:42):
I am actually drinking an Italian white wine Castillo de poggio.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
Oh sure, make make put us down we lower class burs.
Speaker 4 (44:53):
Well you have I know up folks.
Speaker 3 (44:59):
Bra Oh bravo, well done. I'm glad one of us has.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
Taste it took a little bit.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right.
Speaker 4 (45:09):
I'll tell you what my next drink is. Is this,
you know, Nimitz cocktail. I've got it written down and
I'm okay right now.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
You'll like it. It's good. But don't drive after or
for that matter, try to walk.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Always drink responsibly. There's the little picture there. You go,
all right again, folks. The book is The Battle of
Midway by doctor Craig Simons, and then the other one
is Shattered Sword by John Parshall and uh Anthony Tolly Anthony. Yeah,
be sure to have those on your shelf. There's any
(45:43):
last final thoughts for us?
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Oh for me? Mm hmm oh well, uh, I'll take
the opportunity to uh flog my newest book. How's that
please do? One of the things I wanted to do
after I finished the Nimics book was right about the
junior officers who actually fought the war, and so I
(46:07):
focused on the Naval Academy class of nineteen forty. It's
kind of a band of brothers. Go to see approach.
I follow these guys from their arrival at the Naval
Academy in the summer of nineteen thirty six. Follow them
through their academy years and then into the war through
the surrender on the deck of the Missouri in nineteen
forty five. So this is the book Annapolis Goes to
(46:30):
War the Naval Academy class of nineteen forty and it's
trial by fire in World War Two. It's just out.
It's out this month in fact.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
Wow, So here we go.
Speaker 4 (46:41):
You heard it here first.
Speaker 3 (46:42):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
There's a good old release for everyone.
Speaker 4 (46:46):
If you're not careful, we're going to have you back
on to talk about that book. Now.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
That would work, That would work, We can do that.
We can set that up.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
Okay, all right, but bo.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
I think I think this gets us for the first
little filler. Stick around. There is another part to this
little doubleheader on midway, and we'll be back with more
of that. And remember, if you are a listener, and
by being a listener, you can head over to the
buy Me a Coffee page drop down on the comment
section there, and for five dollars a month when we
do a series, you get the whole thing all but once,
(47:18):
and you get a little bit of advance access as well,
plus some kind of freebies that Bow and I throw
your way every now and again so be a listener,
help us, help the show keep things running. You know
who knew that podcasting cost money and you barely ever
come out on top. But here we are Doctor Simon's
again a pleasure bow as always a joy. Until next time, folks, cheers.
Speaker 5 (47:41):
We'll see night.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
Whole crew, that Cole crew talking about puddle crew.
Speaker 4 (48:11):
Everybody need pumble
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