Miles Browning - Midway

Midway

Halsey suffered a severe attack of dermatitus on the Enterprise on the way back from the successful Doolittle bombing. Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, Halsey's hand-picked successor, inherited Browning and his staff just prior to the Battle of Midway. Spruance, who had commanded only a cruiser division since the beginning of the war, was concerned about leading a carrier group because he had no prior aviation or carrier experience. Halsey reassured him, telling Spruance to rely on his battle-hardened staff, especially Browning.

Unfortunately, Browning had limited social skills, and Spruance found it difficult to get along with his chief of staff during and after Midway. Military historian Samuel Eliot Morison referred to Browning as "one of the most irascible officers ever to earn a fourth stripe, but he was a man with a slide-rule brain." Others said he had a "calculator brain" and "a superintellect that evoked praise – often begrudging – from his superiors." Browning is commonly described as "crusty and brawling," clever, daring, exceptionally aggressive and uncontrollable. He was by no means a deft social mixer. He was willful, arrogant, a hard drinker, and violently tempered. Despite his unpopularity, he was respected as a brilliant tactical officer.

Midway would be a critical battle for the United States and its allies, one that all parties knew might very well determine the outcome of the war in the Pacific. After the devastation of its battleships at Pearl Harbor six months earlier, the U.S. Navy was forced to place all its hopes on a small aircraft carrier force that was dwarfed by the strength of Japan's Combined Fleet. Browning was charged with directing the impending battle as the Imperial Japanese Navy, undefeated for over 350 years, bore down on Midway Island.

American intelligence had decoded Japanese messages and knew roughly where the Combined Fleet would be headed. Although unaware of that breach in its radio security, the Japanese Navy changed its codes out of protocol while under sail for the strategically crucial U.S. airbase at Midway. The Imperial Fleet, under Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, knew that it would meet resistance. The intention was to draw whatever was left of the American fleet into a battle wherein any remaining U.S. naval warships could be destroyed. Yamamoto's second-in-command, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the hero of Pearl Harbor, was so confident in the plan that he failed to anticipate carrier-based aerial attacks from any of America's remaining carriers, and presumed that the heavily damaged Yorktown had been sunk during the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Some accounts credit Browning's tactical genius and carrier operations experience with winning the battle of Midway. Spruance wanted to wait to launch fighter aircraft until the Japanese ships were within 100 miles (160 km). Browning, however, had deduced that the Japanese would commit to another strike on Midway Island and that he could catch them off guard. By ordering Enterprise 's fighters to attack the Japanese task force on sight while the Japanese planes were committed to fueling and rearming operations on deck, Browning caught the Japanese ships without adequate protection and was able to sink all four of Japan's big carriers, as he had predicated in his 1936 tactical thesis.