Episode 4 - “Midway Is East”

Summary

EP4, despite Henry Salomon's title, waits until 11:03 to mention Midway Island, about 1,300 miles north-northwest of Honolulu. The first portion of the program surveys Japan's territorial aggression following the 7 December 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, all of these actions preceding the conflagration at Midway on 4 June 1942. Bennett's opening music [A] establishes the mood as EP4 begins.

The bold Hanser-Salomon narration lists major locales of Japan's offen-sives. In keeping with Salomon's dramatic and poetic aims for Victory, the sequence is memorably alliterative rather than chronological or alphabeti-cal: “Manila, Mindoro, Mindanao; Hong Kong, Hainan, Hanoi; Macassar, Mandalay, Malaya; Bataan, Bangkok, Borneo; Cambodia, Cavite, Corregidor; Batavia, Bandoeng, Bali; Singapore, Shanghai, Sumatra; Panay, Palembang, Pescadores; Surabaya, Soembawa, Soemba.”

EP4's music is 100 percent Bennett until SONG-SEAS at 10:15, accompanying US ships transporting supplies from America to Australia. While a few of the J-tunes that debuted in EP2 recur here, this first part of EP4 is mostly all-new, one-time material. One strictly pentatonic motto is [B], heard at 2:15 and again at 3:15. J-1 appears several times early in EP4, including the bold brass gesture of punctuation [C] at 2:25, which returns at 3:25 and 4:29. As Japanese infantry advance aggressively across rivers and hills there's [D] at 2:31 and [E] at 2:56. At 3:32 the footage dissolves to British colony Hong Kong, assaulted only four hours after Pearl Harbor, which resisted surrender until 25 December 1941. J-1 returns, serving as the bass line. Japan's attack on another US territory in the Pacific, the Philippines, occurred at about the same time, and at 4:01 [F] Manila, its capital city, passes to Japanese control. The J-1 [E] gesture returns at 4:29 for yet another bold Japanese move, its invasion of Malaya and eventual humiliation of British, Australian, and Indian forces at Singapore; Churchill would describe this defensive stronghold's loss as the “worst disaster” in Britain's military history. Singapore's defenders, concerned only with enemy approaches by sea, thought Japan incapable of attacking successfully overland from the north, but “the enemy comes crawling down on Singapore. The jungle does not stop them. The scattered defenders do not stop them. Nothing stops them.” Bennett makes fresh use of his J-tunes here, with [G] at 5:04 using J-5a, [H] at 5:31 using J-1, and then [I] at 6:14 using J-5b, as Britain's General Percival leads his forces’ surrender on 15 February 1942.