Quote:
Originally Posted by soopaman2
History is always written by the victor, and will always do so to make themselves look as noble as possible. The man in my signature attempted that with purges and propaganda. As did the Brits and Americans (minus the purges).
Just an educated hypothesis...
Maybe the thinking at the time was because Germany favored "cheap" sub warfare, and they were the enemy, it automatically makes it evil. (even if we partook in the same behavior)
The carrier battles, and devastating warship salvos are always highlighted at Midway, because it is head to head, rather than hit and run, sneaky "dishonorable" fighting. Hence the nobility re-write I mentioned.
Maybe that is why they call it the silent service, not because you are isolated, but because you are behind the scenes and underacknowledged.
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I do not think that is the case at with regards to Midway at all. It's been a while since I read
Shattered Sword but as I recall the authors go into some detail on the historiography of the battle from wartime accounts until publication of their book. It's fascinating to read the staples, Walter Lord's
Incredible Victory, Fuchida's
Midway; The Battle that Doomed Japan, Prange's
Miracle at Midway etc. and see how the narratives match so very well while several glaring logical contradictions are present but ignored. The knife edge timeline of the conventional account makes too good drama to discard.
Likewise all the English language accounts mention
Narwhal's relentless but unsuccessful attack on the Kido Butai and how it ultimately paid off for the
Enterprise air strike. So it's disingenuous in the extreme to state that she represented some "unsung" asset. The subsequent loss of
Yorktown and
Hammann to the boldly handled
I-168 was a great embarrassment to the USN, particularly as she got away clean and so was played down in early versions of the story. It however, provided for the Japanese, one of the few bright spots in an operation where the Imperial Navy was batting well below average overall.
Nevertheless, the story did change considerably as the War retreated into the past. Morrison's official version in his
Naval Operations omits much compared with the much later Prange, who benefited by being allowed to use classified material and Fuchida's book is nothing short of an apologia that has all the pitfalls of an eyewitness account and 20/20 hindsight while lacking much of the primary source data that could back up his version of events. Still all are important to build the overall picture and worth reading even today.
The USN always had problems with PR that were deeply institutionalized from the top down. So they tended to keep things close to the vest as it were and miss some opportunities to set the record straight or suffer from attempts to camouflage disasters even long after the event. An example of this effect can be found in 1964's
Clear for Action: The Photographic Story of Modern Naval Combat 1898-1964 by Hailey and Lancelot. Even two decades after the battle the book repeats much of the wartime Air Force canard that land based air intervention was almost as important to the victory as the carrier strikes. This myth grew out of the reluctance of the Naval press office to initially release too much info in the wake of the Battle for security reasons, a mistake that the media savvy Army Air Force jumped on with both feet. Of course the Air Force knew that for all their efforts and losses they never even scratched the paint on a Japanese warship but why let facts get in the way of creating a legend. Particularly at the expense of an inter-service rival.
The evolution of the Midway narrative, from wartime propaganda to the release of
Shattered Sword provides excellent lessons for anybody who might be interested in how information regarding a historically significant event can be manipulated, distorted and controlled. Even without any sinister or conspiratorial motives.