The Falling Stars of Victory
What the Battle of Midway and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power can teach us about being faithful to the spirit of the source material
“But Earendil came, shining with white flame, and around Vingilot were gathered all the great birds of heaven…and there was battle in the air all the day and through a dark night of doubt. Before the the rising of the sun Earendil slew Ancalagon the Black, the mightiest of the dragon-host, and cast him from the sky…Then the sun rose, and the host of the Valar prevailed…”—The Silmarillion
If I haven’t already made this clear, some of you may have guessed by now that I am a history nerd in addition to having a love of Tolkien. It’s been my passion even longer than I’ve known the Professor’s work and its adaptations, and it’s what I got my degree in and am currently pursuing a Masters in. So if ever you were wondering where the constant references to the Byzantine Empire, the Wars of the Roses, or Gothic armor in my past writings and on my socials come from, there you have it, my dear readers; and the Masters degree is part of the explanation why we went all of July without any new long-form content being released. I apologize for that 😊 One area of history that I am particularly knowledgeable of is the Pacific War, the titanic clash between the Japanese Empire and the United States and its allies that was spawned by the former’s brutal war of conquest in China. And one of the most dramatic and decisive battles of this war occurred only six months in, around 300 miles northwest of tiny Midway Atoll; there, two carrier task forces of the US Pacific Fleet won a great victory against the proud Carrier Striking Force of Japan’s Combined Fleet, sinking four of the six aircraft carriers that had ravaged Pearl Harbor for the loss of only one of their own. This battle would not only be of tremendous psychological and tactical importance, but of strategic value as well, opening the door to the first American counterattack on Guadalcanal two months later. To an extent, the power that this battle has exerted upon history and legend, similar to the power that J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings has exerted upon Western and fantasy literature, is perfectly captured in a line from Walter Lord’s 1967 history of the battle, Incredible Victory: “They had no right to win, yet they did, and in doing so they changed the course of a war. More than that, they added a new name—Midway—to that small list that inspires men by shining example. Like Marathon, the Armada, the Marne, a few others, Midway showed that every once in a while, ‘what must be’ need not be at all. Even against the greatest of odds, there is something in the human spirit—a magic blend of skill, faith, and valor—that can lift men from certain defeat to incredible victory.”
Notice how I said “history and legend”? Because, for various reasons, almost immediately the story of the battle became shrouded in misconceptions, misunderstandings, and outright lies. And the fault for this lies squarely with some of the people who were actually present at the battle on both sides, who deliberately chose to misrepresent their actions and those of their peers to put themselves in the best possible light. And because of the fact that they were, well, there, for nearly 60 years their account was taken as gospel. To the great detriment of subsequent scholarship. From 1949 when the battle featured in Volume 4 of Samuel Eliot Morison’s landmark history of the US Navy in World War II, all the way to the the present day, myths such as the crowded Japanese flight decks, the prowess of Captain Miles Browning, the infallibility of the codebreakers (after decades of being marginalized by the Navy establishment in Washington), and the direct intervention of God Himself, have stuck around in our understanding of this event. Despite the best efforts of more recent historians to put them down once and for all by taking a closer look at the actual primary sources and choosing to tell the stories of more participants. Legends do have that kind of power.
And sometimes, the legends and myths can have serious negative consequences. One need only look at some of the discourse that has greeted Season 1 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and see how various misconceptions about both the show and the world of Tolkien that it brings to life have clouded and darkened what should have been a moment of great joy. 19 years after the The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King triumphantly brought to the screen the conclusion of Peter Jackson’s wonderful adaptation of Tolkien’s trilogy, here is a fresh look at this beautiful world and its inspirational characters and great stories, the “tales that really matter” if you will, that bore none of the stink and regret of the much less successful Hobbit films. This should be cause for celebration! And for many people, it was. But too many other people came into the show deeply suspicious of what had become a culture-war talking point before we ever saw the First Look from Vanity Fair in February of 2022, clutching closely at Peter Jackson’s realization of Middle-earth that had become their own, and/or fiercely protective of their own personal interpretations of this lore and world, its themes and ideals. The stage was set for every aspect of Rings of Power to be murderously and shamefully attacked online, and for these attacks to find a fertile ground where, in a perfect world, they should have found barren soil.
But the story of the Battle of Midway, and the great tales of Middle-earth, don’t need embellishment or tailoring. There is power in them just as they are, and to try to use them for something that they aren’t does a disservice to the sailers and airmen who fought so bravely, and to the professor who poured so much of himself into creating this world. That’s the point that I’m trying to make here. My positive feelings about Rings of Power should be no secret to anyone who reads my blog or follows me on my linked socials, especially my Instagram. They are not the result of a paycheck from Amazon, or even official membership in excellent fansites like TheOneRing.net and Fellowship of Fans. No, they are because I deeply love the world Tolkien created and all attempts to bring it to life in good faith, of which Rings of Power is one. Just as much as I love the historical drama of the Battle of Midway, and the recent attempts both historically and dramatically to tell the truth about it and to see what we can learn there.
By the first week of May 1942, it would appear that Imperial Japan’s bid for hegemony, raw materials, and empire in the Pacific and Southeast Asia was going to become a reality. The Imperial Navy rampaged triumphant from the Indian Ocean to the Central Pacific, the Army had covered itself in glory and seemed to have been forgiven for the quagmire it had gotten the nation into in China. Two great European empires, the British and the Dutch, had been humiliated and destroyed respectively, and the Americans had been driven all the way back to Australia. Almost everyone in Japan was filled with optimism and hope that their mission from the gods themselves to bring about a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” was within reach. One of the few people who wasn’t happened to be Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Combined Fleet, the iron heart of the Imperial Navy. A maverick and visionary, blunt and outspoken in a society where reticence and duplicity were valued, he knew that a long war with the United States could only end in Japan’s defeat; in his most famous quote, in October of 1941 he had stated that “If I am told to fight regardless of consequence, I shall run wild considerably for six months or a year; but I can promise nothing after that.” The Kido Butai, the carrier task force that had struck Pearl Harbor and was the Combined Fleet’s swift and terrible sword, was not even home when he began planning for a “decisive battle” against whatever was left of the Pacific Fleet somewhere in the Central Pacific, in particular with its carriers which had not been at Pearl that day. Just as Japan had essentially ended its war with Russia back in 1905 with a crushing victory at Tsushima, so did Yamamoto hope that the destruction of the Pacific Fleet would force America to sue for peace. Six months later, thanks to his considerable skills at planning and blackmail and his and the Navy’s great prestige, he was at sea aboard the mighty 72,000-ton battleship Yamato, leading 200 ships in five different fleets towards a rocky atoll called Midway, a thousand miles from Hawaii.
Unfortunately, although Yamamoto was well aware in the abstract of America’s desire for retribution for Pearl Harbor, the thought apparently never crossed his mind that they would seek vengeance much sooner. Indeed, his entire plan hinged on his belief that the Americans were too demoralized to accept battle unless they could be coaxed out with an elaborate trap. This was not at all the case. Admiral Chester Nimitz, the unflappable, composed, but also aggressive and bold commander of the Pacific Fleet, actively wanted a fight, not out of desperation but because he fully expected to win under the right circumstances. Even before Midway, he was responsible for sending his carriers on numerous actions into the fringes of the Empire, most of them morale-boosting pinpricks but sometimes pitched battles, including the Battle of the Coral Sea that repulsed a Japanese naval invasion of Port Moresby. And as his skilled intelligence agents at Station Hypo passed along all they could tell of the impending Japanese onslaught, he saw that the circumstances of a decisive battle were presenting themselves, if only he could seize the moment. And he did everything he could to do so. Midway itself was turned into an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” packed with as many planes as it could hold. A herculean effort to repair the USS Yorktown of prior battle damage saw the carrier brought to fighting form, if not quite good as new, in only three days. And when his best carrier admiral, William Halsey Jr., was forced ashore with a bad case of shingles, Nimitz confirmed the battle-experienced Frank Jack Fletcher and the prudent, analytical Raymond Spruance as his commanders in the field; even though they were both battleship admirals, he trusted their temperaments, skill and combat experience.
In the event, Nimitz’s gamble and willingness to accept battle paid off in truly dramatic fashion. There were a few moments during the first crucial day of June 4th when everything was touch-and-go, and when bad decisions closer to the action had serious negative consequences both to the overall American plan and to the pilots who died for their superiors’ mistakes. But at about 10:22 am, three squadrons of SBD Dauntless dive-bombers from USS Enterprise and Yorktown, perhaps the finest dive-bomber in the world at the time, fell upon the Kido Butai at the worst possible time for the Japanese. In five minutes the carriers Akagi (“Red Castle”, and Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s flagship), Kaga and Soryu (“Blue Dragon”) were all mortally wounded. Hiryu (“Flying Dragon”) initially escaped and was able to cripple Yorktown, but was in turn shattered by a counterattack from Enterprise that afternoon. By June 5, all four Japanese carriers had sunk or were scuttled, and would be joined on June 6 by the heavy cruiser Mikuma; 248 aircraft were lost and nearly 3000 sailors were killed. By contrast, the Americans only lost Yorktown and one destroyer to a submarine on June 7, 150 aircraft and around 300 dead. It was a glorious victory, and although Yamamoto would fight on desperately until his death in April 1943, the “great wave” of American might that he had prophesied would not be stopped. Not until it was lapping at the shores of Japan itself.
There it is, a highly oversimplified account of the Battle of Midway. But if one dives deeper into a more detailed account of the battle, a treasure trove of high drama and poignancy, tragedy and excitement, can be discovered. How Yamamoto’s hubris, personal and cultural fondness for complexity, and devotion to Mahanian naval doctrine led him to concoct a ridiculously rigid and complex plan that was in serious trouble almost from the start. How Joe Rochefort and Edwin Layton, Nimitz’s gifted intelligence chiefs, were essentially able to trick the Japanese into confirming that Midway, and not a target in the South Pacific, was the objective of this new Japanese offensive. How the inexperience of Midway’s fliers, the arrogance of Captain Marc Mitscher of the USS Hornet, and the staggering incompetence of his “teacher’s pet” Cmdr. Stanhope Ring threw away almost half of the airpower Nimitz had so painstakingly assembled for no tangible gain. How, by contrast, the boldness and initiative of various officers aboard Yorktown and Enterprise, from Admirals Fletcher and Spruance down to individual pilots, more than made up for this all in the space of only about 5 minutes. How Yamamoto, helplessly watching the battle unfold from four hundred miles away, went through all five stages of grief before finally ordering a retreat, and how his chief of staff Matome Ugaki never did get past the fourth. These are only a few examples of why the story of Midway needs no embellishment, even if it’s not necessarily a story that Tolkien would have written. According to his biographer Humphrey Carpenter, he thought air combat was both inherently immoral and uniquely dangerous (and the numerous accidents suffered by US Navy pilots in routine training and patrol flights would have only confirmed him in his beliefs); and in the Notion Club Papers, Elendil is positively scathing about the modern iron-hulled ships that Numenor has introduced thanks to the influence of Sauron. But still, there is enough there that lovers of his world and his ideals would recognize.
Unfortunately, embellishment is exactly what we got, and the process began practically before the victorious Americans and defeated Japanese had even returned home. For the Japanese, they had a very simple but very hard question to answer: how could their divine race with its superior equipment, training and battlefield experience, and six months of nearly uninterrupted victory, have suffered such a calamitous defeat? As for the Americans, they had to ponder how, despite their advantages in intelligence and local numerical superiority, the battle had ended up being as close as it had been, and how some of their most skilled naval aviators like Mitscher and Captain Miles Browning (Halsey’s chief of staff, ostensibly advising Spruance but he ended up making several serious mistakes that Spruance had to rescue him from) had performed so abysmally. In both cases, the solution chosen by Mitscher and Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka (Admiral Nagumo’s chief of staff) when writing their after-action reports was simple: use bureaucratic double-speak to obscure the truth, attribute their misfortunes purely to bad luck, and hope that nobody would notice. And in the long run, it worked, helped by the distraction of Japan’s terrible losses in the Solomon Islands and Mitscher’s later prowess as commander of the Fast Carrier Task Force. But this would be child’s play compared to what followed, as the revered chroniclers Mitsuo Fuchida and (admittedly to a much lesser extent, but very subtly and cleverly) Samuel Eliot Morison went further and outright lied about numerous aspects of the battle, such as the infallibility of Japanese carrier doctrine and tactics, the overwhelming power of the Japanese fleet directly involved in the Midway operation, the fecklessness of Nagumo, the irrelevance of Fletcher, or the skills of the aforementioned high-ranking US Navy aviators.
And because of their privileged positions (Morison was already a famous historian who was writing the official history of the US Navy with the personal blessing of FDR, and Fuchida was an eyewitness to both Pearl Harbor and Midway), the legends and lies they wrote down became accepted as historical fact. Not until 1967 did Walter Lord in Incredible Victory become the first English-speaking historian to really acknowledge the crucial contributions of Nimitz’s codebreakers and of Admiral Fletcher as overall commander, both of whom had been marginalized by the Navy establishment for nearly 20 years. Not until the 1970s would the official Japanese military history of the war, Senshi Sosho, be published and expose Fuchida as a fraud to the Japanese people, and not until 2004 would Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully publish their Shattered Sword, which exposed to an English-speaking audience that the “Japanese side” of the Midway story they’d accepted for generations was deeply flawed. Only in 2006 would John Lundstrom publish Black Shoe Carrier Admiral, a massive and definitive combat biography of Fletcher that argued strongly for him to receive the credit he is due for Midway. Finally, the best and single-volume history of the battle in English that we have today, by US Naval Academy professor Craig Symonds, wouldn’t be released until 2011.
A heroic and inspiring story which is incredible in its own right, but has been put through the ringer by subsequent interpretations and is only now being allowed to breath and to stand on its own merits? While I have been talking mostly about the Battle of Midway thus far, it’s time to actually return to the overall inspiration for this blog: the legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien. Specifically, the vast untapped treasures of the Second Age, which The Rings of Power is endeavoring to bring to life. Until the show’s premiere, the only real sustained knowledge a general audience would have of this age comes from the prologue of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring, which is serviceable and in some moments deeply poetic and epic, but in some ways is also deeply flawed. Somewhat similar to the landmark histories of Midway by Walter Lord and Gordon Prange, which were also flawed but written in much better faith than Fuchida and Morison’s accounts. But actually learning the story of the Second Age for oneself? That was an incredibly daunting task, akin to tapping into original Japanese sources or US Navy pilot logs and other records. One short chapter at the end of The Silmarillion and half of another, two “essays” and one fairly self-contained story in Unfinished Tales, and various mentions scattered throughout Tolkien’s letters and the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth; and except for the story of Aldarion and Erendis, none of this material is written in a style that is conducive either to easy reading or visual storytelling. So it’s perhaps understandable that this age has lasted so long without a serious attempt to bring it to life.
With that in mind, I am of course not saying that Rings of Power is exactly equivalent to Shattered Sword, Black Shoe Carrier Admiral, and The Battle of Midway; Adam Payne and Patrick McCay are too inexperienced to be perfectly analogous to Parshall and Tully, Lundstrom and Symonds, and Season 1 of the show definitely shows it. But it does fulfill a similar role, by directly tackling the untapped material of the Second Age and drawing from it to tell a story and to engage with and share Tolkien’s themes and ideals. And it succeeds so much better than it has any right to considering their inexperience and the story and legal constraints they operated under. Many of Tolkien’s deeper themes are actually addressed in the course of the story, such as free will, original sin, divine providence, and the three theological virtues, in ways in which the Jackson trilogy only really hinted at. That untapped history of the Second Age is truly brought to life, and is recognizable as an interpretation of Tolkien’s writings made from honor and good faith. And no honest person can deny the heart and passion McPayne and the cast and crew like Morfydd Clark, Rob Arramayo, Lloyd Owen, Leith McPherson, Kate Hawley and Bear McCreary, bring to the task; it shines forth brightly in all their press and in the finished product itself. So in theory, this show and the new interest in Tolkien’s Second Age that it has inspired should be welcomed by the community. Why then has it been so controversial? Not a failure, mind you, not with highly respectable viewership numbers and critical reviews or numerous awards and nominations including seven Emmys. But why has the show been treated as quite literally an attack upon Western civilization and upon God Himself by some people? And these are only the more extreme of the negative, bad-faith reactions that are so common.
I think that part of the problem lies with the fact that the Jackson trilogy is so triumphant and so influential. Even though it only covers the Second Age in a six minute prologue, people have tended to extrapolate what the films show us of Middle-earth in the Third Age and the War of the Ring into earlier periods of Tolkien’s legendarium. And because of how good and how definitive it is, some of its artistic and storytelling choices became gospel even if Tolkien himself never wrote them, such as how the Elves are emotionless, infallible and angelic, or how Sauron was a malevolent evil from the start, or how Isildur ended his life a fallen coward, or how Galadriel is explicitly a sort of Marian archetype who looks like Cate Blanchett, or how the Halflings have always been gentle and jolly English country folk. And far too many viewers had only read the trilogy, and perhaps The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, with no idea that Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, On Fairy-Stories or hundreds of Tolkien’s letters even existed. Even if they had…Tolkien’s more extended and “scholarly” works require a certain amount of determination to get through and understand, and having done so can breed a certain fierce protectiveness of one’s achievement and one’s own interpretation. I should know, I was like this at one time. You might not know it from my current writings, but ideas like Galadriel being an Amazon in shining armor, or the existence of Harfoots, or the Numenoreans going to war not as medieval knights but as Byzantine cataphracts, took some getting used to on my part.
That I got used to these ideas is due in large measure to my understanding that Tolkien never intended his work to be some sort of unchanging, infallible holy writ. To quote myself, from my review of Season 1: “He rewrote sections of the original trilogy in the 1950s to help facilitate it being adapted into a radio show by the BBC. In the 1960s he began to rewrite The Hobbit in an attempt to forcibly retcon it to tonally fit with the trilogy; he was eventually talked out of it around chapter 3. And of course, the vast collection of supplemental materials that his son Christopher dedicated his life to organizing and editing, which we know as Unfinished Tales and the History of Middle-earth? It includes not only initial drafts of his various stories, but also later additions and retcons to existing lore, including to the original trilogy.” I have also come to learn how Tolkien’s understanding of his world changed over time. It’s true, he did initially set out create a mythology for England, feeling a lack of such in his own literary studies; the Arthurian sagas didn’t feel organically English in his view. But with time, he began to realize that such an enterprise was beyond him, calling such dreams “absurd” and laughable in his famous letter to Milton Waldman. So as a mythology for England, Middle-earth is something of a bust. But Middle-earth still serves a real and noble purpose. Carpenter states, “He did not suppose that precisely such peoples as he described, Elves, Dwarves and malevolent Orcs, had walked the earth and done the deeds that he recorded. But he did feel, or hope, that his stories were in some sense an embodiment of a profound truth.” Or as the Professor himself put it: “We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God.” So the Great Tales of Middle-earth are still precious, as beautiful and inspirational vessels of great virtue, wisdom, and hope. Just as Walter Lord wrote about the Battle of Midway, and just as Rings of Power has taken a stand for against a tide of cynicism and nihilism in fantasy television. But in both these cases, the true purpose and worth of these stories can only really be understood by dispensing with past preconceptions and misunderstandings, and by going back to the original source material for ourselves. That is what the best of the new scholarship of the Battle of Midway has done, and that is what Rings of Power is doing and will continue to do for some years hence.
Towards the end of the most recent movie about the Battle of Midway, as his staff celebrates their great victory, Woody Harrellson’s Nimitz places a phone call to Dennis Quaid’s Halsey in the hospital, where the latter is recovering from the severe shingles that had kept him out of the battle. Upon hearing the news, Halsey says “God bless those brave boys. Turns out all they needed was a fair fight.” He’s right, in more ways than one. Thanks to both the personal failures of Yamamoto and the cultural and institutional ones of the Imperial Navy, the hard work of the codebreakers, and Nimitz’s choices, the American fleet at Midway did indeed face a much fairer fight than subsequent legend would have us believe. And acknowledging that fact in no way invalidates the courage and sacrifice present in the true story of Midway, once the smoke is cleared and the truth is revealed. And in a way, Halsey is right about Rings of Power as well, even though he died in 1959. Once the smoke and fog of online discourse and negativity cleared with the show finally being released to a general audience, it showed its quality. And in a truly dramatic fashion too; despite coming three weeks after House of the Dragon’s premiere, a show with an established fanbase and more experience at the helm, its pilot won 25 million viewers, nearly double the numbers for the established giant’s premiere. And the scrappy newcomer more than kept pace both in viewership, critical reception, and awards nominations. It really was like Earendil defeating the mighty dragon Ancalagon in the War of Wrath, or the blue Dauntlesses with their white stars shattering the proud Blue and Flying Dragons of the Kido Butai. I suppose that, in a world where it seems that every fantasy adaptation is trying to copy Game of Thrones' nihilism, grimness and cynicism, a general audience was hungry for something that took a clear stand for good vs evil, for hope vs despair, for light vs darkness. And that is something to be celebrated, not only that the show exists but that people are responding to it.
For Further Reference
Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography
Drachinifel, “The Battle of Midway—Myths, Legends and Greatness (with Jonathan Parshall)”
Kings and Generals, “Battle of Midway—Pacific War #28 Animated Documentary”
Charles Larrivee, “Wonders Beyond Our Wandering: A deep dive into Season 1 of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”
—"The Sunne In Splendour: A character defense of Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”
— “Triumphant Leader: A defense of Galadriel’s depiction as a warrior in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”
—“Downfallen, But Never Forgotten: Reflections on The Fall of Numenor”
John Lundstrom, “Frank Jack Fletcher Got a Bum Rap: Part One”
—Black Shoe Carrier Admiral: Frank Jack Fletcher at the Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal.
Eric Mills, with Jonathan Parshall, “Midway: Timeless Battle, Evolving Interpretations”
Montemayor, “The Battle of Midway 1942: Told from the Japanese Perspective”
—“Hiryu’s Counterstrike”
—“The American Perspective and the Strategic Consequences of the Battle”
Robert J. Mrazek, A Dawn Like Thunder: The True Story of Torpedo Squadron Eight
Jonathan Parshall, “Research & Debate—Reflecting on Fuchida, or “A Tale of Three Whoppers”
—“Grading Midway’s Commanders”
—with Anthony Tully, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway
Luke Shelton, “Why Calling Tolkien’s Work ‘A Mythology for England’ is Wrong and Misleading”
Craig Symonds, The Battle of Midway
—Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
—Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth
—The Fall of Numenor
—The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien