José Bernardo Cruz Rodríguez 🇪🇦🇮🇱

June 1942. Midway. Admiral Raymond Spruance, the quiet American commander, has just sunk four Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft carriers in a single afternoon: Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu. It is the most catastrophic naval defeat in modern Japanese history. Thousands of Japanese sailors are now in the water, clinging to debris, three thousand miles from home. By the ruthless mathematics of total war, the correct American move is to let them drown. Sailors in the water are sailors who will not reinforce the enemy. The U.S. Navy's own cruisers are in range of a Japanese counterstrike. Spruance refuses. He orders his destroyers to stop and look for survivors. For hours. Among Japanese sailors who, days earlier, had been preparing to invade American islands. His chief of staff objected on operational grounds. Spruance answered, in his usual quiet voice, "We have no quarrel with men in the water." American destroyers pulled thirty-five Japanese sailors out of the Pacific after Midway. One of them later wrote a memoir describing, in careful detail, the American sailor who gave him the blanket off his own back. Years after the war, Admiral Spruance, by then U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines, hosted a small private dinner at his residence. At the table were three former Imperial Japanese Navy officers. One of them was Mitsuo Fuchida, the man who had led Pearl Harbor. Another was Minoru Genda, Yamamoto's air staff officer who had designed the Pearl Harbor strike plan. The third was a surviving Japanese destroyer captain who had fought at Midway. Spruance, the quiet Indianan, poured tea for them himself. He talked about carrier operations. He talked about the Pacific weather patterns that had decided Midway. He did not talk about victory. When he said goodbye at the door, he bowed to them in the Japanese fashion. Fuchida said later, through tears, that it was the moment he understood the American naval officer class had considered them peers, not animals, even in the middle of the worst war. Spruance died in 1969. At his memorial, letters arrived from the Japanese Navy veterans' association, in Japanese. They called him sensei. Teacher. Because the American admiral who sank your carriers also made sure to pull your sailors out of the water. And bowed to your officers at his dinner table. And treated your war as what it was — a fight between warriors, not a verdict on your worth as human beings. That is what distinguishes a great power from a brutal one. America is a lot of things. At Midway, on that afternoon, she was Spruance saying, "We have no quarrel with men in the water." Japan should say his name too.