Admiral Yamamoto was no Big Brother who stamped out dissent. The trouble was that his fellow seamen stood in awe of him. He commanded such personal prestige that few subordinates—and indeed, precious few of his nominal superiors in Japan’s military government—were inclined to find fault with his guesswork about how battle would unfold off Midway. The upshot: the Kidō Butai and accompanying surface forces steamed into action assuming their enemy had no will to fight yet would counterattack. Janis and Orwell would chuckle knowingly.
A devil’s advocate is a precious commodity. That has to be one of the takeaways from revisiting the Battle of Midway seventy-five years on, and it should be etched on the internal workings of any martial institution that wants to survive and thrive amid the rigors, danger, and sheer orneriness of combat. Despite Japanese mariners’ tactical brilliance and élan, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) leadership was prone to such ills as groupthink and strategic doublethink. Worse, the IJN fleet was cursed to be led by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto [3]—a leader of such stature and mystique that subordinates deferred to him out of habit. Never mind whether his ideas concerning operations and strategy made sense.
As they sometimes didn’t. The result of Japanese seafarers’ deference prior to Midway: the needless loss of the Kidō Butai, the IJN’s aircraft-carrier fleet and main striking arm. Worse from Tokyo’s standpoint, Midway halted the Japanese Empire’s till-then unbroken string of naval victories. The Kidō Butai had rampaged throughout the Pacific and Indian oceans for six months following its December 1941 raid on Pearl Harbor [7], only to come to grief at the hands of a ragtag three-carrier U.S. Navy force composed of USS Enterprise, Yorktown, and Hornet and commanded ably by admirals Ray Spruance and Frank Jack Fletcher.