The Middle of the Middle

Owing to circumstances which will only ever be understood by me and the Lord, I found myself this past weekend idly watching Midway.¹ Not the cartoon version directed by Roland Emmerich; rather, the cartoon version directed by Jack Smight. I have no idea who Jack Smight is—IMDB assures me that the man directed some 70 films and TV shows, but honestly the name sounds like something the studio made up after the original director took his name off the project. Midway is one of a fleet of movies churned out between the late-60s and late-70s in the interest of celebrating the great battles of the Second World War as its youngest participants began to reach the 50-year mark. It would be another 20 years before studios began to spend actual money on WW2 films; these are almost uniformly execrable, and Midway perhaps more than most.²

What the film does have going for it is a vast panoply of flabby, washed up actors looking for a quick buck: Charlton Heston gnawing viciously like a starving dog at every piece of scenery in sight; Hal Holbrook gamely trying to Hal Holbrook the movie out of the pits; Robert Mitchum in a ludicrous turn as Admiral William Halsey stuck in the hospital with some sort of skin infection that requires him to be painted purple; Henry Fonda as Admiral Chester Nimitz, making Grand Oratory while Holbrook stands next to him pretending to listen; James Coburn, Robert Wagner, Glenn Ford, Cliff Robertson, Robert Webber, Dabney Coleman, Pat Morita and a whole host of Japanese actors you’ve seen a thousand times but could never name, and, in a bid to get the kids into the theater, Erik Estrada and Tom Selleck.

That’s obviously where the producers spent all their cash, because the movie consists mostly of groups of these actors standing in front of maps and extruding large, awkward chunks of exposition (“Damn it Bill, the Japanese could be anywhere behind that storm front! That one! Right where I’m pointing!”), or sitting in fake aircraft cockpits with goggles on. It’s a war movie, so it needs some war, but this problem is solved mostly with old, jarringly mismatched newsreel footage, clumsy miniature aircraft carriers, and little snippets of film plucked from Tora! Tora! Tora!³

“Soylent Green is for kids, you damn dirty ape!”

When I was 12 I didn’t care about any of this. The Battle of Midway was a matter of special interest to me—I know not why—and I had the names of the commanders and various squadrons of torpedo bombers and dive bombers committed to memory. I was particularly moved by the story of Ensign George Gay, a torpedo bomber pilot who was the only survivor out of the 30 pilots and gunners of his squadron. Gay ditched his plane not far from the Japanese carrier Soryu and wound up watching the decisive phase of the battle while treading water with a seat cushion over his head to avoid being spotted. This blew my 12-year old mind. I carried his story around with me for years until I picked up a newspaper one day in 1994 to discover that he’d died at the ripe age of 77. Ripe for a guy that probably should have been dead at 25.

I think it’s fair to say that Midway treats the enormity of his story with all of the weight of an episode of CHiPs or Magnum, P.I., but there is one thing Midway got right: the speed with which the Japanese navy turned from the brawny, ocean-commanding colossus that struck a near fatal blow at Pearl Harbor six months earlier into a feeble, threadbare, motley collection of tin boats struggling vainly to put a dent in the vast industrial might of the United States. The Battle of Midway occupied three days in June of 1942, but the decisive blow lasted all of 24 minutes, at the conclusion of which three of the four aircraft carriers Japan sent to escort their invasion fleet to Midway had been turned into blazing infernos. Although the fourth carrier would be sunk later that day, those 24 minutes, beginning at 10:22am, were critical not only for the battle but for the whole war. Japan would never recover from their losses at Midway.

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” So said Winston Churchill to the House of Commons at the height of the Battle of Berlin. He was referring to a peculiarity of air combat, in which a relatively small number of pilots do the bulk of the fighting and dying. Some 1,542 British pilots were killed defending against German attacks over just short of four months. Contrast that with the nine-day fight for the bridges along the Eindhoven-Nijmegen-Arnhem corridor in the Netherlands in September of 1944, in which more than that number were lost every single day.

Just over 300 American pilots and sailors were killed in the brief conflagration of Midway, and yet the battle was almost inarguably the turning point of the war in the Pacific. That, my friends, is perhaps the clearest example of extreme force applied across a very small area. So few indeed.

The next year is going to be very ugly—as ugly as Heston’s “acting” or whatever that was that he did in Midway and, let’s face it, his whole career—whether we’re talking about here at home or on the world stage. There’s no way to know which way things are going to go or what might prove decisive. I’d feel wrong spinning a story about hope or heroism; it’s all unknowns. But I like to think about George Gay now and again. He didn’t know how things would turn out either but he did what he believed he needed to do and wound up somewhere he probably never expected, floating like a cork in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, watching as—over a timespan shorter than a single episode of Happy Days—a devastating military machine the likes of which the world had not previously seen dissolved in a pall of smoke and flames to be blown away forever by the ocean breeze.⁴

And one day they’ll make a shitty film.

1. The leading hypothesis is that since I’ve seen it a hundred times and that it’s bad, I can dip in and out without feeling like I’m doing a disservice to the American cultural community.

2. Battle of the Bulge being the absolute bottom of the barrel; a film so slipshod that nobody bothered to ask whether the footage cribbed from some desert war picture was an appropriate depiction of December in Belgium.

3. In one brief shot the superstructure of a battleship can be seen behind a building. There were no battleships at Midway.

4. While I love the idea of leaving you with a riddle, I feel I should go ahead and tell you that the title of this piece comes from another Churchill speech, this one from November of 1942, shortly after the British victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein, in which the German threat to the Middle East was decisively concluded. “This is not the end,” he intoned, “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” I don’t know if we’re at the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end but Churchill either had a crystal ball or he was bluffing. It always seems like the middle of the middle until one day it’s all over.