Jawohl, mein Fuhrer. 
Of course, even at their maximum production, the Japanese never could have produced enough of them to damage the US much. They just didn’t have the raw materials available, or the production capacity. Once the war started they were going to get buried by the US. Period. Only the time-frame was a variable.
Wow! Thanks for the link, I felt like I was in the middle of the battle. Great read!
Going back to the AP versus general purpose bombs vs torpedo bombers, there was a bit of wisdom I recall reading somewhere: Experience has shown that it is far more effective to sink warships by opening up holes in the bottom to let water in than it is to open up holes in the top to let air out.
Basically, ships are made out of a great deal of metal, in multiple layers. Even if it’s not an armored ship, there is a lot of stuff there on a ship to catch a contact-fused bomb and set it off on the top. On the top of the ship you have the guns, some crew spaces, the flight deck on a ship. Below that you have machinery, the power plants, the magazines, the fuel storage, and the water (very important to the ship, the water is).
Drop an armor piercing bomb, and you’re more likely to cause severe damage to many of the things that let the ship work. Take out a boiler or an engine, and the ship is crippled, unable to keep up with the rest of the fleet (or escape as easily from your bombers). Hit the fuel tank, and you may cause a major fire, vastly reduce the ship’s ability to operate aircraft, or even leave a trail of oily breadcrumbs to allow your bombers to find them again. Hit the magazines, and you may take them out of the fight entirely, even if you don’t sink them.
Then again, hit them with a torpedo or two, and the ship might just obligingly take on water and sink. Or the torpedo will fail to detonate, and break apart after impacting the hull, as happened with one of the USS Nautilus’s torpedoes when she tried to give the crippled Akagi a coup de grace. Such was the quality of American torpedoes early in the war.
And yeah, as others have said, regarding the “Dumb Luck” version of the Battle of Midway that has been accepted by historians, and the “Cunning Plan” version where we sacrificed our torpedo bombers in a brilliant plan to fake out the Japanese so the dive bombers could surprise them at a key moment… I go for the version that requires less complexity. So dumb luck it is. Extra complexity is a surefire way to screw up a plan (like the Japanese did at Midway, actually, splitting their force up into three groups rather than just massing them all on the primary objective).
You’re welcome. What I haven’t found is any description of the Mk. 21, nose, and Mk. 23, tail, fuses. I know the pilot could chose which fuse to use based on what was needed for a particular target. I assume the nose fuse was a contact type that would have had it’s time delay set by the loading/arming crew on the carrier. The tail fuse is a bit more confusing. Did they detonate after the tail propeller stopped spinning? Did they have a propeller/spinning thingy? That would have allowed HE or AP bombs to detonate deeper within the target.
Here’s another link providing a general description of dive bombing history.
I was with you up to that point! I submit that a bomb that penetrates the magazines will be as effective as any torpedo, if not moreso.
ISTR that the Mk. 23 fuse was an inertia fuse, ie one that fired when a firing pin impacted the primer. When dropped nose-first into a target, the sudden slowing of the bomb would cause the firing pin in the tail fuse to break free and keep moving forward, striking the primer and detonating the bomb. Since this took a measurable amount of time (1/100th of a second), the bomb could penetrate the target rather than detonating on contact. The little propeller thingies were delay mechanisms, I believe, designed to make sure the bombs fell a certain distance before they armed.
The Mk. 21 fuse was a simple contact fuse that went off on impact. Useful for land target but pretty much a waste of boom against an armored ship.
A further disadvantage lies in the necessity for greater accuracy when using the armor piercing bomb. The demolition bomb is many times more powerful in mining effect, weight for weight, than the armor piercing bomb. The latter is therefore almost useless, unless it obtains a direct hit. The demolition bomb, on the other hand, while it does a great deal of damage on a direct hit, is probably even more destructive, when it explodes in the water alongside the ship, within the distances mentioned above, and from 20 to 40 feet under the surface of the water.
Larger, 1000/2000 lb HE bombs could act as a mine, breaking ships apart or damaging them severly enough to slow or disable them, if the pilot managed to “barely or by accident” miss a ship and the bomb detonated close to and lower than the ships keel. Near misses could damage rudders, steering gear, propellers, shafts, and bows. Ask the crew of the Bismark.
Wasn’t that a torpedo?
Oops. Why, yes it was. I just remember that a Fairey dropped it. However, I assume that any living crew member of the Bismark would agree that a 2000 HE bomb detonated under the stern of the Bismark would have had similar results.
(I’m backpedaling as fast as I can. 
)
No sweat. If you believe in Faireys, clap your hands!
Furious did not have an armored flight deck. It was a WW1 “battlecruiser” converted to a carrier in the 20’s. (Along with Courageous and Glorious.)
The armored flight deck was a mixed blessing (and a compromise in tactical thought) in terms of damage control.
It did indeed help prevent all but the largest ordnance from penetrating below. It was also used to support the hull in general, IIRC. But if it does get damaged or warped, it takes major dock yard work to fix. Armoured flight deck - Wikipedia
Edit: Bah! Too slow.
Torpedos were considered the main ship killing weapons, according to doctrine for both sides.
But torpedos are easier to evade, and torpedo plans had to approach the target slower and closer than dive bombers, so a mixed approach, simultaneously executed, was what was desired.
What’s interesting is that the Japanese knew about at least one American carrier had been sighted before the American attack that proved ultimately successful. (Planes from Midway had been attacking in dribs and drabs earlier that morning.) It was decided to wait and rearm the Midway Strike aircraft before engaging the American carrier, all according to the prevailing carrier doctrine of a massive (Alpha) strike, smothering the target with numbers and from multiple angles of attack.
The Americans got lucky indeed.
At the risk of a hijack, let me leverage this to ask a question that’s always bugged me.
Many times, I’ve read that US torpedo bombers had to fly the last part of their run on the target in a straight line for two minutes, to allow the torpedo’s gyroscope(s) to “set” on that course, so that the torpedo would go straight.
This seems flat-out crazy to me. What warship will remain on a given speed and heading for two minutes as torpedo bombers line up on her? And how likely is a plane to survive flying “straight, level, low, and very close” to a ship’s AA batteries for two minutes?
Wouldn’t it be better to simply take one’s chances with the torpedo being deflected off its course, rather than give the enemy so much time to evade and so simple a solution to shoot you down? Just shut off the gyroscopes before loading the torpedoes, and take you chances with their accuracy? Even if the torpedoes were horribly inaccurate without gyroscopes, they were missing with the gyroscopes anyway, and having the entire squadron shot out of the air to boot.
Or could an accurate torpedo have been designed without this ridiculously difficult requirement for launching? One with “faster” gyroscopes, or gyroscope-free?
That part of the whole scheme just seems like any…uh, every…knowledgeable pilot or naval officer would have raised objections during training, long before battle.
None, at least none if they have a chance to spot the torpedo planes before it’s too late (which is not necessarily a given).
That’s why torpedo runs didn’t really target the ship per se. Rather, the whole flight would hopefully drop enough torpedoes front, aft and dead center of the ship, and as late as possible, in the hopes that no matter what evasive manoeuvre it went for, a couple might could hit. Maybe detonate too, with a lot of luck ! (American torpedoes were absolute shit early in the war. To be fair, so were German ones. That’s one of the precious few tech fields where the Japanese had a clear and unchallenged upper hand).
But do remember that big ships, the kind that warrant torpedoes over bombs in the first place, have a whole lot of momentum to work against. So for them, 2 minutes doesn’t allow for very dramatic changes of course/position or even speed. Even less so when you factor in the fact that such big tubs typically sail in the middle of a big formation of other ships presumably also going for full tilt evasive manoeuvres, thereby limiting the range of tactical options available to everyone.
Nimble destroyers are another story naturally, but that’s where the dive bombers come in.
Nope. WW2 torpedoes, particularly early war ones, were *really *fucking finicky.
They pretty much had to impact the target’s hull at as close as possible to a 90° angle, else they’d just fail to register the hit (at least, that was the theory - in actual practice, and at least for submarine torps, due to aforementioned utter shittiness of early war American torps and shenanigans at the Bureau of Ordnance, the ones used throughout the first 2 years actually functioned worse at perfect angles than they did in high deflection shots. But sub skippers were still directed to only ever take such “perfect” shots…).
As for not spinning the gyros properly, that’d lead the torpedo to not only run misaligned, but go pretty much wherever it wants to. Left 2° per 200 yards, right 20° per 1000 yards, going full circle, following the currents, straight to the bottom… We’re not just talking “inaccurate” here, more like “utter waste of time”.
Properly dropped torpedoes were not inaccurate because they didn’t swim straight, but because it’s really hard to do the kind of quick trigonometry is required to land a hit on an evading target, from a purely guesstimated distance, while flying at 150 knots and dodging hordes of Zeroes ;).
Also because they were duds more often than not. All the aiming in the world won’t help there.
Later in the war, proto-homing torpedoes were designed to automagically go towards propeller sounds, as well as torpedoes that would travel in pre-set snaking patterns rather than in a straight line after running a given distance. At least, that’s for submarine torpedoes - not sure whether air-dropped ones saw the same improvements.
But even then, they still relied on gyros to get the improved torpedoes at least in the general vicinity of a target.
Another point about torpedo bombers.
Up until the late thirties (and into the forties), anti-air armament consisted of, typically, .30cal or .50cal machine guns, and one or two manually aimed 3inch (75mm) high angle guns.
So up until the war, these straight and level approaches, while still dangerous, were not suicidal until navies started mounted 20mm (than 40mm) automatic cannon, and in quantities that put up a “wall of steel”.
Here’s a contemporary training film that will tell you more than you ever want to know about aerial torpedo attacks.
Good lord, they were beating on torpedoes with hammers. 
A few points:
(1) Islands with airfields were unsinkable Aircraft Carriers, and were the the most important pieces
of the Pacific war at sea. Japanese dive bombers and torpedo bombers with their combat radiuses
of 800 miles and more would have been able to operate at a considerable advantage over US carrier-based attackers.
(2) Although they scored no hits US Midway-based aircraft caused considerable confusion and disruption
in JN movement, and within JN command.
For a nonfiction account in gripping prose see works by the USN official historian, Samuel Eliot Morison,
and for a spellbinding dramatization see Herman Wouk’s War and Rememberance (BTW, both authors were
USN WW2 combat veterans, and Wouk is still with us at age 98).
(3) Possession of Midway would have put the entire Hawaiian Islands within range of Japanese horizontal
bombers (Wiki is contradicted by other sites) and fighters, so considerably more US resources would
have to have been earmarked soley for air defence had Midway fallen.
(4) US doctrine called for dive bombers to attack first, drawing enemy fighter defence upward, facilitating
sea level toprpedo bomber attack. What actually took place, in an exact reversal of doctrine, took place by chance,
and was not planned.
Amazing films. When we’re they declassified?
I’m sure they were at the time.
Dad was an amateur radio operator, and had a receiver that was used in B-24s. The manual had a stamp on it classifying it as secret. Thirty years later it had been declassified.