The Battle of Midway

After Pearl Harbor: the quarrel over the second phase

On 7 December 1941 (Hawaiian time) aircraft from six carriers under Chūichi Nagumo struck the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, damaging all eight battleships present and sinking four of them. The three US carriers assigned to Pearl Harbor, however, were at sea, and the oil storage and repair facilities were not attacked. Within months Japan took British Hong Kong, the Philippines, British Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, reaching its initial strategic goals and above all the oil of the Indies. Planning for the next phase began in January 1942, but strategic disagreements between the army and the navy, and infighting between the Naval General Staff in Tokyo and Isoroku Yamamoto's Combined Fleet, meant that a follow-up strategy was not settled until April. The Naval General Staff wanted to seize parts of Australia, but the army, with large forces tied down in China and Manchuria, refused the troops; on 13 March the two services agreed instead to prepare operations against Fiji and Samoa to cut the sea links between Australia and the United States. 1 2 3

Yamamoto won this bureaucratic struggle with a thinly veiled threat to resign, and his plan was adopted. Before the war he had concluded that naval power depended on oil and industrial capacity and that Japan had little hope of defeating the United States; he hoped, though he probably did not believe, that heavy early blows might bring the Americans to negotiate. His primary strategic goal was the elimination of the American carrier forces that had survived Pearl Harbor. The Doolittle Raid of 18 April sharpened that concern: sixteen US Army Air Forces B-25 bombers launched from the carrier Hornet struck Tokyo and several other Japanese cities. Militarily insignificant, the raid was a shock that exposed a gap in the defences of the home islands and their vulnerability to American bombers. Other American carrier raids in the South Pacific showed that the carriers were still a threat. 2 4 5

China paid the heaviest price for the Doolittle Raid. Short of fuel, the bombers crash-landed along the east China coast or their crews bailed out; one landed near Vladivostok, and the Soviet Union, not at war with Japan, interned its crew as international law required. The Japanese army launched the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign to keep the eastern coastal provinces from being used again for an attack on Japan and to take revenge on the Chinese people. Some 50,000 km² were laid waste and an estimated 10,000 Chinese civilians were killed during the search for Doolittle's men. Missionaries called the killing and burning that began when Japanese troops entered Nancheng in Jiangxi on 11 June "the Rape of Nancheng", and as the army withdrew, Unit 731 left pathogens in contaminated food and wells. 5

In the south, meanwhile, Operation MO to seize Port Moresby and Tulagi led to the Battle of the Coral Sea on 4–8 May. The United States learned of the plan, under the overall command of Shigeyoshi Inoue, through signals intelligence and sent two carrier task forces and a joint Australian-American cruiser force. It was the first naval action in which the opposing fleets neither sighted nor fired upon each other, fighting over the horizon with carrier aircraft alone. Japan lost the light carrier Shōhō and the fleet carrier Shōkaku was badly damaged; the Americans lost Lexington, and Yorktown was damaged. In ships sunk it was a tactical Japanese victory, but Inoue recalled the Port Moresby invasion fleet, and for the first time in the war a major Japanese advance had been turned back. More important still, the damage to Shōkaku and the aircraft losses of Zuikaku kept both carriers out of Midway the following month. 6 2

Yamamoto's Operation MI and the Aleutians

Yamamoto reasoned that another attack on Pearl Harbor would draw out the whole American fleet, carriers included, but judged a direct attack too risky now that American land-based air power in Hawaii had grown. He chose instead Midway, a tiny atoll at the north-western end of the Hawaiian chain some 2,100 km from Oahu, beyond the effective range of almost all American aircraft on the main islands. Midway itself mattered little in Japan's wider design, but the Japanese expected the Americans to treat it as a vital outpost of Pearl Harbor and to defend it vigorously. The Americans did indeed consider it vital: after the battle a submarine base there extended the radius of submarines operating from Pearl Harbor by about 1,900 km. The aim of the operation was to capture Midway and to lure out and destroy the US Pacific Fleet, above all its carriers. 2

Like much Japanese naval planning, the scheme, named Operation MI, was exceedingly complex, requiring several battle groups spread over hundreds of miles of ocean to mesh at precise times. It rested on optimistic intelligence that Enterprise and Hornet were the only carriers the Pacific Fleet had left: Yorktown, badly damaged at the Coral Sea, was believed sunk, and American morale was grossly misjudged as broken by months of defeats. To deceive the Americans Yamamoto dispersed his forces, his battleships and cruisers trailing Nagumo's carriers by several hundred miles. One reading holds that they were to finish off a weakened American fleet in a daylight gun battle; another that Yamamoto, who distrusted battleships, sent them out to appease the battleship faction in the Naval General Staff and sailed himself in the giant Yamato. Either way Nagumo's screen consisted only of two fast battleships, two heavy cruisers, a light cruiser and twelve destroyers, while the two light carriers, five battleships, four heavy cruisers and two light cruisers under Yamamoto and Nobutake Kondō never saw action at Midway. 2

To win the army's support the navy agreed to back the army's seizure of Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian Islands. The army wanted the islands to keep American land-based bombers in Alaska out of range of the home islands, while Americans feared they would become bases for raids on the West Coast. Earlier accounts long treated this Operation AL as a feint to draw American forces north, but in the original plan it was to be launched simultaneously with the attack on Midway; a one-day delay in the sailing of Nagumo's force meant that it began a day earlier, on 3 June. After two carrier raids on Dutch Harbor the Japanese occupied Attu and Kiska in June; the Americans retook Attu in May 1943 and landed on Kiska in August only to find that the Japanese had already gone. Operation AL drew off still more ships that could have strengthened the force striking Midway. 2 7

Nagumo's carrier force had its own weaknesses. With Shōkaku and Zuikaku out after the Coral Sea, he had lost his two most advanced ships and commanded only Akagi and Kaga (Carrier Division 1) and Hiryū and Sōryū (Carrier Division 2). The four carried 248 aircraft, but dive bomber production had been sharply cut and torpedo bomber production stopped altogether, so there were no replacements, and many machines in service since the start of the war were nearly worn out. The carriers were laced with fuel lines and full of wooden flooring, timber beams and cotton pipe insulation, and had no fire-suppressing foam: the force "could throw a punch but couldn't take one". Without radar its early warning was weak, and radio contact with the fighters was poor. Scouting was in disarray: the submarine picket line was late, so the American carriers reached their assembly point north-east of Midway, "Point Luck", undetected, and Operation K, a flying-boat reconnaissance of Pearl Harbor, was thwarted because American warships occupied the refuelling bay at French Frigate Shoals. 2

Station HYPO and the American ambush

Nimitz had one critical advantage: American cryptanalysts had partly broken the Japanese naval code JN-25b, and from early 1942 they had been reading messages about a coming operation against an objective called "AF". Joseph Rochefort, head of Station HYPO at Pearl Harbor, believed that AF was Midway and that the blow would fall in the central Pacific in late May or early June. OP-20-G, the navy's cryptanalytic section in Washington, pointed instead to the Aleutians, Port Moresby or even the American West Coast and insisted on mid-June, and the Chief of Naval Operations, Ernest King, was persuaded by Washington. Jasper Holmes of HYPO proposed that the Midway garrison, instructed by undersea cable, broadcast in plain language that its water purification plant had broken down. Rochefort took the idea to Nimitz's intelligence officer Edwin Layton, who put it to Nimitz, and Nimitz approved. Within a day the codebreakers picked up a Japanese message that "AF was short on water". 2 8

Fixing the date was harder, because the date-time groups in Japanese messages were enciphered again before being encoded in JN-25. Layton credited Lieutenant Joseph Finnegan with discovering how they were locked, and an intercept of 26 May ordering destroyer groups to escort the invasion transports, read with this table, clinched the date as 4 or 5 June. Japan's new codebook had been delayed and came into use only on 24 May, after the important breaks had been made. During May Rochefort's unit decrypted, analysed and reported as many as 140 messages a day, and in the week before Nimitz issued his final orders it was processing five hundred to a thousand a day. The Americans entered the battle with a good picture of where, when and in what strength the Japanese would appear. Nimitz reckoned that the Japanese had thrown away their numerical advantage by dividing into four groups too far apart to support each other, and that his three carriers, whose air groups were larger than the Japanese ones, together with the aircraft on Midway gave him rough parity. 8 2

Nimitz gathered every flight deck he could. William Halsey, commanding Task Force 16 with Enterprise and Hornet, was stricken with shingles, and his escort commander Raymond Spruance took his place; Frank Jack Fletcher's force with Yorktown was hurriedly recalled from the South West Pacific. Yorktown, damaged at the Coral Sea, had been expected to need months of repairs at Puget Sound, but the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard worked around the clock and in 72 hours made her fit for two or three weeks of operations; crews from the repair ship Vestal were still working aboard as she sailed, and her air group was rebuilt with squadrons from Saratoga and whatever pilots could be found. On Midway itself 122 aircraft were assembled, among them 31 PBY patrol planes, Marine Corps aircraft, and seventeen USAAF B-17s and four torpedo-armed B-26s. The Marines' F2A fighters and SB2U bombers were already obsolete, but they were all the corps had. 2

The morning of 4 June: the strike on Midway and Nagumo's dilemma

On the morning of 3 June Ensign Jack Reid, flying a PBY, spotted the Japanese occupation force some 930 km west-south-west of Midway, and the B-17s sent after it hit nothing. That night a PBY torpedo struck the oiler Akebono Maru, the only successful American air-launched torpedo attack of the battle. At 04:30 on 4 June Nagumo launched 36 dive bombers, 36 torpedo bombers and 36 Zero fighters against Midway, together with seven scout planes; one from the cruiser Tone took off thirty minutes late, and the search was thin and hampered by bad weather. Midway's radar picked up the raid at 05:53 and the Marine fighters rose to meet it, but most of the F2As were shot down, and from 06:34 the base was heavily bombed. Yet of the 108 attacking aircraft 11 were lost and 14 heavily damaged, the airfield and most of the ground defences survived, and the strike leader reported that a second attack would be needed if troops were to land by 7 June. 2

American aircraft that had taken off from Midway also attacked the carriers: six new TBF Avengers detached from Hornet's air group, the Marine dive bombers, torpedo-armed B-26s and B-17s. The Japanese lost only three Zeros while destroying five Avengers, two SB2Us, eight SBDs and two B-26s. Among the dead was Major Lofton Henderson of the Marines, who led his inexperienced SBD squadron into action; two months later the main airfield on Guadalcanal was named after him. One badly damaged B-26 flew straight at Akagi's bridge and narrowly missed it before crashing into the sea; had it struck, Nagumo and his staff might have been killed. The experience may have contributed to Nagumo's decision to strike Midway again in violation of Yamamoto's order to keep the reserve armed for anti-ship operations. Meanwhile the submarine Nautilus closed in and fired torpedoes, and the destroyer Arashi spent a long time hunting her. 2 9

Following Yamamoto's orders, Nagumo had kept half his aircraft in reserve, the torpedo bombers armed with torpedoes against American warships. At 07:15 he ordered them re-armed with bombs for land targets. About half an hour later, at 07:40, the delayed scout from Tone reported a sizeable American force to the east; Nagumo seems to have received the report only around 08:00. He reversed the re-arming order and asked for the composition of the force, and the report of a single carrier came 20 to 40 minutes later. Tamon Yamaguchi, commanding Carrier Division 2, urged an immediate strike with the 34 dive bombers at hand. But the Midway strike force was about to return and had to land, spotting and launching would take at least 30 minutes, and aircraft sent off without proper anti-ship armament or fighter escort risked the fate he had just watched befall the American bombers. Japanese doctrine preferred fully constituted strikes, and Nagumo decided to recover his first wave and then launch a reserve armed with torpedoes. 2 10

Nagumo's choice respected doctrine, but time was against him. Had he launched what he had at about 07:45 and accepted the ditching of the returning strike, the result might have been a powerful, well-balanced force able to sink two American carriers, and armed and fuelled aircraft inside the ships were far more dangerous than aircraft in the air. Whatever he chose, he could not have stopped the American attack: Enterprise and Hornet had begun launching at 07:00 and finished by 07:55, and Yorktown by 09:08. The aircraft that would deliver the crushing blow were already on their way, while in the hangars of Akagi and her sisters bombs and torpedoes piled up instead of being stowed in the magazines. 2

The sacrifice of the torpedo squadrons and the dive bombers’ blow

Acting on the PBY sighting reports of the early morning, Fletcher ordered Spruance to launch as soon as practicable, holding Yorktown back for a time in case other Japanese carriers appeared. Spruance judged that, though the range was extreme, a strike could succeed. The Japanese had launched 108 aircraft in seven minutes; Enterprise and Hornet took over an hour to launch 117. Spruance ordered the squadrons to head for the target at once rather than wait to assemble. He accepted that fighters, dive bombers and torpedo planes arriving separately would suffer heavier losses, betting that keeping the Japanese carriers under constant attack would stop them from preparing a counterstrike and that he would catch their flight decks at their most vulnerable. Hornet's strike, led by Commander Stanhope Ring, flew a heading of 265 degrees instead of the reported 240 and missed the Japanese carriers, and ten of its fighters ran out of fuel and ditched: the "Flight to Nowhere". 2

Lieutenant Commander John Waldron, leading Hornet's Torpedo Squadron 8, broke away from Ring and followed the correct heading, finding the Japanese carriers at 09:20. Without fighter escort all fifteen of his TBD Devastators were shot down without scoring a hit, and Ensign George Gay was the only survivor of the thirty aircrew. Enterprise's Torpedo 6 lost nine of its fourteen planes, and Yorktown's Torpedo 3, attacking at about 10:00, lost ten of twelve. The unimproved Mark 13 torpedoes ran under their targets, exploded prematurely or failed to explode at all. The attacks nonetheless had three results: the Japanese carriers, forced into evasive manoeuvres, could not prepare their counterstrike; the combat air patrol was pulled out of position chasing low-flying torpedo planes; and many Zeros ran short of ammunition and fuel. Torpedo 3, coming in from the south-east, drew most of the patrol in that direction. 2

At that moment three squadrons of dive bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown approached from the south-west and north-east. Enterprise's air group commander, Wade McClusky, though running low on fuel, kept searching and spotted the wake of the destroyer Arashi racing back to the main body after hunting Nautilus, and followed it. Nimitz later judged that his decision to continue the search "decided the fate of our carrier task force and our forces at Midway". The three squadrons arrived almost simultaneously at the right positions and altitudes. The Japanese fighters were low, chasing torpedo planes; the hangars were full of armed and fuelled strike aircraft; fuel hoses snaked across the decks; and the repeated changes of ordnance had left bombs and torpedoes stacked in the hangars instead of the magazines. 2 11

From 10:22 the two Enterprise squadrons, meant to take Kaga and Akagi one each, both dived on Kaga through a miscommunication. Recognising the error, Lieutenant Richard Best and his two wingmen pulled out and headed north for Akagi. Kaga took three to five hits and was engulfed in fire; a bomb on or just in front of the bridge killed Captain Jisaku Okada and most of her senior officers. Akagi took only one direct hit, almost certainly Best's, but it struck the edge of the midships elevator and exploded in the upper hangar among armed and fuelled aircraft, a fatal blow; Nagumo's chief of staff Ryūnosuke Kusaka recorded planes standing tail up, "belching livid flames and jet-black smoke, making it impossible to bring the fires under control". At the same time Lieutenant Commander Max Leslie's Bombing 3 from Yorktown scored at least three hits on Sōryū. Within six minutes Sōryū and Kaga were ablaze from stem to stern, and Akagi too was eventually abandoned. Nagumo was reluctant to leave, but Kusaka persuaded him, and at 10:46 he shifted his flag to the light cruiser Nagara. All three carriers were scuttled; Kaga was sunk by the destroyer Hagikaze. 2 9

Hiryū strikes back and Yorktown is lost

Hiryū, the only Japanese carrier left, struck back at once. Yamaguchi's first wave of 18 dive bombers and 6 Zeros followed the retiring American aircraft to the first carrier they found, Yorktown, and hit her with three bombs. With a hole in her deck and only one boiler working, Fletcher moved his staff to the heavy cruiser Astoria. Within an hour, though, damage control parties had patched the deck and restored power, and she resumed air operations at 19 knots. When the second wave of ten torpedo bombers and six Zeros arrived about an hour later, the repairs were so effective that the Japanese pilots took Yorktown for a different, undamaged carrier. Two torpedoes left her without power and listing 23 degrees to port. Mistaken reports that each strike had sunk an American carrier lifted Japanese morale, and they prepared one more strike against what they believed was the last. 2 12

Late in the afternoon a Yorktown scout found Hiryū, and Enterprise launched 24 dive bombers, her own and orphaned Yorktown planes. Though more than a dozen Zeros defended her, Hiryū took four or possibly five hits and burned, unable to operate aircraft. Abandoned and torpedoed by a Japanese destroyer, she stayed afloat for hours and sank the next morning. Yamaguchi and her captain, Tomeo Kaku, chose to go down with the ship, costing Japan perhaps its best carrier officer. As darkness fell Fletcher, unable to command properly from a cruiser, ceded operational command to Spruance. Spruance knew he had won a great victory but was unsure what Japanese forces remained; fearing a night surface action, he withdrew east before turning back west at midnight. Yamamoto sent his surface forces to look for the American carriers and detached cruisers to bombard the island, then ordered a general withdrawal. Had Spruance pursued and met Yamato and the other battleships in the dark, given Japanese superiority in night fighting, his cruisers would very likely have been overwhelmed and his carriers sunk. 2 12

At 02:15 on 5 June the American submarine Tambor sighted the cruiser force coming to bombard the island but sent only a vague report of "four large ships". Manoeuvring to avoid her, the heavy cruisers Mogami and Mikuma collided, and over the next two days strikes from Midway and then from Spruance's carriers fell on the stragglers: Mikuma was sunk and Mogami limped home badly damaged. Salvage of Yorktown, now under tow, was going well, but on the afternoon of 6 June the Japanese submarine I-168 slipped through the destroyer screen and hit her with two torpedoes. A third torpedo from the same salvo broke the destroyer Hammann, which had been supplying Yorktown with power, in two; she sank with the loss of 80 lives, mostly from her own exploding depth charges. Yorktown capsized and sank at 07:01 on 7 June. 2 13

By the end of the battle 3,057 Japanese had died: 2,181 aboard the four carriers (Akagi 267, Kaga 811, Hiryū 392, Sōryū 711) and another 792 aboard the heavy cruisers Mikuma and Mogami. The United States lost the carrier Yorktown and the destroyer Hammann, and 307 Americans were killed, among them Major General Clarence Tinker, commander of the Seventh Air Force, who personally led a bomber strike from Hawaii on 7 June and was killed when his aircraft crashed. The treatment of prisoners differed sharply. The Japanese interrogated three captured American airmen; two were tied to water-filled kerosene cans and thrown overboard, and the third was murdered on the destroyer Arashi. Nagumo's report stated only that one had "died on 6 June and was buried at sea". The Americans picked up two Mikuma crewmen and 35 men from Hiryū from life rafts and boats and took them to Pearl Harbor. 2

Concealing the defeat, and after

On 10 June the Imperial Japanese Navy gave the military liaison conference an incomplete picture of the battle. Nagumo's detailed report, submitted to the high command on the 15th, stated that "the enemy is not aware of our plans (we were not discovered until early in the morning of the 5th at the earliest)", when in fact the whole operation had been compromised by American code-breaking from the beginning. Japanese news announced a great victory. Only Emperor Hirohito and the highest navy command were accurately told of the carrier and personnel losses, and even the army believed for a time that the fleet was in good condition. The wounded who returned to Hashirajima on 14 June were classified as "secret patients" and isolated from other patients and from their own families; the remaining officers and men were dispersed, likewise barred from visiting family, to units in the South Pacific, where most of them died. 2

No flag officer or staff officer of the Combined Fleet was penalised. Nagumo, who had reported two American carriers sunk, was given the rebuilt carrier force and led it in the battles of the Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz during the Guadalcanal campaign; even after the tactical victory at Santa Cruz he acknowledged that the attrition of experienced pilots was a "shattering strategic loss for Japan". After Midway he seemed to have lost his aggressiveness, and in 1944 he wept when telling his two sons about it. On 6 July 1944 he killed himself on Saipan. The navy did draw lessons: more aircraft were refuelled and re-armed on the flight deck rather than in the hangars, unused fuel lines were drained, and new carriers were redesigned with only two elevators and new firefighting equipment, though the later losses of Shōkaku, Hiyō and Taihō suggest that problems remained. Above all, replacement pilots pushed through an abbreviated training regimen were of sharply lower quality, while the surviving veterans were worn down at the front with few chances to rest. 2 9

The fortunes of the Americans who made the victory were uneven. Nimitz recommended Rochefort for the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, but King rejected it, reportedly regarding him as "one of the most unmilitary-looking officers he had ever encountered". After John Redman of OP-20-G in Washington complained to King about the Hawaii station, Rochefort was moved out of cryptanalysis to command a floating dry dock at San Francisco and never served at sea again; some accounts say he was made a scapegoat for the embarrassment of a better-resourced Washington that should have read Japanese intentions first. He received the Legion of Merit at the end of the war over King's objection, and the Distinguished Service Medal only posthumously, in 1986. Spruance was criticised for not pursuing the retreating Japanese, but in 1975 Clay Blair defended him: he could not have launched aircraft after nightfall, he had lost most of his torpedo bombers, and his destroyers were critically low on fuel. 8 2

Assessment: the "turning point" and beyond

Midway is often called "the turning point of the Pacific". John Keegan called it "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare", and Craig Symonds ranked it alongside Salamis, Trafalgar and Tsushima. It was the Allies' first major naval victory against Japan, and had Japan won, Saratoga would have been the only American carrier in the Pacific until new ones arrived at the end of 1942. The phrase needs qualification, however. The United States moved from naval parity to supremacy only after several more months of hard fighting; Midway opened the way for the Allies to take the initiative and land on Guadalcanal in August. Some regard the Guadalcanal campaign, which lasted until February 1943, together with the battles of Milne Bay and Buna-Gona on New Guinea, as the real turning point from defence to offence. It was King who, after Midway, pressed for the operation in the southern Solomons. 2 14 15

Historians also differ over the weight of the losses. A long-standing account held that the loss of veteran aircrew with the four carriers left Japanese naval aviation beyond recovery. Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, however, count 110 veteran aircrew lost, just under 25% of those embarked, and point out that the navy had some 2,000 carrier-qualified aircrew at the start of the war, so that this loss alone was not crippling. The heavier blow was the loss of over 40% of the carriers' aircraft mechanics and technicians, the flight-deck crews and the organisational knowledge they carried; the sharp downward spiral was driven by the Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz battles months later and the steady attrition of the Solomons campaign. The industrial gap was plain: in the time Japan built three carriers, the United States commissioned more than two dozen fleet and light carriers and numerous escort carriers, under a shipbuilding programme already three years old under the Second Vinson Act of 1938. Yamamoto's pre-war judgement that oil and industry left Japan little hope was borne out. 2 4

There is also the problem of memory. Mitsuo Fuchida, who had led the air attack on Pearl Harbor, was on Akagi's bridge on 4 June, recovering from an appendectomy, and in 1951 he and a colleague published an account of Midway from the Japanese side. "Five minutes! Who would have believed that the tide of battle would shift in that brief interval of time?", he wrote, describing decks loaded with counterstrike aircraft armed and fuelled when the American dive bombers arrived, as if a few more minutes would have seen them all airborne. This "fateful five minutes" long passed for established fact, but Parshall and Tully in Shattered Sword (2005), Dallas Isom, Symonds and Evan Mawdsley disputed it; the English Wikipedia article on the battle likewise notes that the few aircraft on the Japanese flight decks at the moment of attack were defensive fighters. Mawdsley wrote that "Parshall and Tully compellingly contradict Fuchida". His claim to have urged a third wave at Pearl Harbor has likewise been criticised as self-serving. A story of bad luck had long covered failures of planning and doctrine. 16 2

Midway showed the worth of pre-war cryptanalysis and intelligence-gathering, and the effort went on to make possible the interception and shooting down of Yamamoto's aircraft in April 1943. After the battle Japan abandoned its plan to meet Germany in the Indian subcontinent and never again launched a major offensive in the Pacific. Yet reading the battle only as a story of carriers and pilots misses something. That same spring, in reprisal for the Doolittle Raid, an estimated 10,000 Chinese civilians were killed in Zhejiang and Jiangxi during the search for the airmen alone, and Japan's war of aggression in China went on for three more years after Midway shifted command of the sea. The military's control of information, presenting defeat as victory and isolating its own wounded, reveals an imperial state that waged total war while hiding its reality from the people. 2 3