[Pete Jamison]

MIDWAY (2019):

I just saw the earliest show possible in my area of this release, in a metropolitan area in the American south. Out of five stars, I’ll give it 4.5.

It isn’t perfect but at this time it appears 80-90% factual, there are no cheap shots insulting the American character and there appear at least two clear condemnations of the Imperial Japanese. One scene actually indicates a war crime (prisoner execution) at the hands of the Japanese Navy, in the past almost always shown in an honorable light. Although its hands were at least somewhat cleaner than the Japanese Army’s (it’s very hard to excuse much that happened at the hands of the Imperial Army), the Navy had the same aim and culture. The argument for Japanese/Navy gallantry is also mentioned (the Japanese were desperate for raw materials and loyal to home and family) but not sanctioned.

The film offers a first. At no previous time has a US war film to my knowledge shown (without the device of a series or miniseries delivery) the progression from the pre-Pearl Harbor attack situation through the attack at Hawaii through all intermediate battles leading to Midway. That’s usually at least two movies that would be needed, but one sees elements of the entire six-month fall of the Imperial Japanese Navy in one production.

One of the Admirals, William Halsey, has a large part in this script although he would not serve in the actual Midway battle. This is, to me, an important moment in our understanding of Halsey. He contributed to the US capability leading up to the battle, as well as recommending Admiral Raymond Spruance as his replacement, who performed well. Due to his choices in the later Leyte Gulf battle, many have claimed that Halsey was near-incompetent, although his off-script actions were allowed by his written orders from Admiral Nimitz in Hawaii, who had confidence in him as did Douglas MacArthur.

Woody Harrelson’s portrayal of Nimitz may not have quite the flair of Henry Fonda’s in the previous film treatment of this battle in 1976 but it’s acceptable. Nimitz was known to be curiously upbeat, smiling a lot. Fonda was exactly the same way and Harrelson must work to accomplish an aura for which he’s not known. I do miss the earlier film’s exchange between a composite character played by Charlton Heston as he quizzes the historical cryptographer Joe Rochefort (Hal Holbrook) as to what level of accuracy Pearl Harbor could actually get from their intercepts, and why it looked like Midway, rather than locations further south, could be the target. But most characters are what I can recognize in this new film as true historical personalities. Importantly, Rochefort’s Intelligence dept. boss Lt. Ed Layton (with whom Rochefort spent 3 years in Japan prior to the war) is given much coverage in this story. That’s needed since Layton was the one on the staff with access to Admiral Nimitz, and could act as the conduit between Rochefort’s information and the operational top. Nimitz could then argue with other services bearing other theories to Navy head Ernest J. King back in the US.

It’s an improvement over the 1976 film not to have an anti-American subplot about the internment of Japanese-Americans – a plotline in which the earlier film neglected to mention who signed the order to set up the camps (the Democratic President of that day). The mood of light melodrama and overbearing seriousness was appropriate since, although with hindsight we now know that the Japanese Empire was already running out of resources and people to prosecute its war, there was a real risk of temporarily losing Midway and Hawaii, which could have been used as bases to at least harass US ports and shipping lanes. And I didn’t think Hollywood was much good at pro-US statements of any kind today; apparently this skill is not lost.

There are some technical glitches surrounding airplanes and battle scenes.  Vehicles are too close together; in reality many combatants never saw each other except as specks for more than a few seconds.  And design details on planes are not all there in a few cases (a torpedo bomber never carries BOTH two high explosive bombs and one torpedo, since it would be too heavy to take off with all three).  But I have enough passenger experience in 19-foot-long stick-and-rudder aircraft to report that most action is shown accurately enough to communicate the danger, the non-electronic basic nature of flight and the convertible-like “drop top” experience of the winds.

I guess word got out that a no-cheap-shot movie might fly. Several US Navy websites have been involved in the film’s promotion. Hollywood even includes a nod to itself, as the film accurately shows director John Ford (commanding a documentary film unit at the time) setting up cameras on Midway Island with no thought to personal safety but every thought and action to getting a good shot of Japanese Zeros bombing his position. He insisted upon staying on the roof of the bunker and operating one of the cameras, totally unprotected.

I recommend this film.

However, I can’t resist, for reference, linking to my favorite scene from 1976‘s effort…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehzzzlIZ5C8&fbclid=IwAR3K4y34vRr_7z0K1w2qCZOyWTilxnjphjSdSjZ71ZDtdSTepFNnqp1AqxQ

/sb

[Harry Binswanger]

Re: Pete Jamison’s post 101380 of 11/8/19

Midway was a triumph of the mind: we did smart things to break the Japanese code. We knew that Midway was the Japanese target and we knew the date they were going to attack. That’s what allowed us to ambush them.

Station HYPO’s intelligence persuaded Chester Nimitz, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, to risk the three remaining U.S. carriers in the Pacific in an attempt to ambush the Japanese attack on Midway. While Midway was a stunning victory for the U.S.—sinking four Japanese carriers for the loss of one U.S. carrier—that was enabled by intelligence and broke the uninterrupted string of defeats and draws the Imperial Japanese navy had inflicted on the U.S

See this and more at: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/11/u-s-in-world-war-ii-how-the-navy-broke-japanese-codes-before-midway.html

Did the movie cover that?

*sb

[AdamReed]

Re: Harry Binswanger’s post 127426 of 11/9/19

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe

In 1940, Alan Turing generalized the design of the cryptological bombe (a special-purpose electro-mechanical computer invented by Marian Rejewski to break the German Enigma) to break any rotary machine code, including Japanese codes. Turing wrote a memorandum to US Navy cryptanalysis office (OP-20-G), and in February 1941, four US officers were sent to Bletchley Park to learn about Turing’s work. The US’ eventual bombes ran at 34 times the speed of the early British bombes.

/sb

[Pete Jamison]

Re: Harry Binswanger’s post 127426 of 11/9/19

The movie didn’t extensively cover the entire range and sequence of cryptography methods but did make a distinction rare in popular film between cryptanalysis (the forced decryption of concealed messages without the luxury of a provided key) and how the reference “AF” was determined to be Midway Island (in Japanese Naval code 25b—version then current).  This latter AF identification was a matter of SIGINT – signals intelligence, rather than cryptanalysis. 

As I understand it, in SIGINT, one may not know what a message means in translation but other knowledge can be inferred, if only from the message’s existence.  For instance, lots of messages coming from one sector and few coming from an adjacent one can mean a large enemy formation in the former sector, or high compliance with radio silence practices in the latter sector. 

An American unit overheard and recorded a Japanese spotter plane stating that it was flying over enemy installation AF (whatever that meant).  Joe Rochefort and Ed Layton at Pearl Harbor guessed that Midway was the item mentioned (as far as their knowledge of Japanese aircraft presence went) but needed to be able to prove it before going to Nimitz.  They faked a transmission about an equipment failure at Midway at the time that they expected another spy plane’s pass, whereupon the Japanese crew reported intercepting an equipment failure message regarding AF.  Busted. 

But Layton also was able to use decrypts—not comparisons but real cryptanalysis—from the Rochefort crew to divine fleet-travel-time-to-target estimates and order of battle specs in code JN25 or 25b, neither of which for some reason had been rotated to a new version for the current month (fortunate for the US).  AND some of the decrypts described AF as the attack target. All this allowed Layton to go into a tough meeting with Spruance and Nimitz (dramatized in this latest film) and provide them with the date and hour of the planned attack (around a dozen messages had to be combined to get this estimate, to my knowledge). 

The 1976 movie shows the intercept’s importance in slightly greater relief than the new film, but enough is made of the short point in the new production that it’s clear that bad coding practice would be one of the top ten or so mistakes made by the Imperial Japanese on their way to losing the battle.

A note on performance: in the Spruance/Nimitz meeting, the actor playing Admiral Raymond Spruance was well chosen.  He delivered a cool but very, very focused attitude said to be a defining characteristic of the historical Spruance, whose nickname behind his back was “electric brain.”  Several reports from those who knew him described a man who could apprehend multiple flows of information with complete calm even if “the entire room was on fire.”  The actor has few scenes but he’s impressive to watch in this role when you’re aware of the history behind the meeting.

/sb

[Pete Jamison]

Re: Adam Reed’s post 127435 of 11/9/19

I don’t know much about the hardware back in the States during this period (Pearl cryptographers were using pencil, paper and primitive circular-scale calculation devices), but I saw somewhere that the multi-wheel device used by the US in the fashion you describe produced the only US military cipher messages never decrypted in any way by the enemy powers during WW2.

/sb

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