Did some reading about the Mark 13 torpedo (the torpedo used by American torpedo bombers and PT boats). By the end of the war, you could drop one from two thousand feet up while doing a few hundred knots and still be sure it would run true. They ended up having to make changes to the design such as adding a ring around the nose to provide additional drag to keep the torpedo from hitting the water too hard or at too sharp an angle.
Actually, my favorite development of the Mark 13 is the GT-1. It was a glide bomb that a plane could drop from 20 miles away, with an autopilot to keep it flying straight and level. Once it got within 20 feet of the water, a paravane trailing behind the bomb would trigger a release, dropping the torpedo into the water (presumably this was one of the torpedoes with the acoustic homing gear or the pre-programmed wandering pattern mentioned above).
Destroyers and submarines had their own models of torpedoes with their own problems that had to be worked on throughout the war.
The USS Razorback is in North Little Rock, Arkansas and may be toured. It has my favorite torpedo, a disarmed nuclear weapon in the stern torpedo room.
It was apparently to shadow the bad guys, and if the balloon ever went up, fire it and run like hell.
No idea. But that websitehas a lot of good info on it. I especially like a cartoon where naval airplanes comisserate about the rough treatment they receive from careless pilots.
It’s my understanding the Japanese never intended to make Midway a major installation, recognizing how difficult it would be to defend while the US held Hawaii. That said, surely the US fighter complement on Hawaii dwarfed whatever the Japanese could have stationed on Midway.
I don’t know how many fighters the US based in Hawaii in 1942, but Pearl Harbor alone had 390 on Dec. 7, 1941. By contrast, Midway based 127 American aircraft for the battle, and that was the result of a deliberate effort to cram additional aircraft onto the atoll for the short term because they knew when the attack was coming.
Plus the land-based US fighters of 1942 (especially the P-38 Lightning) were much better matchups against the Zero than the carrier-based Wildcats.
Hawaii was already crawling with fighters that largely went unusued. Raiders from Midway would have necessitated some fighting, but I have a hard time imagining “considerably more resources” being tied up as a result.
World War II Torpedoes
The failure of the US Magnetic Pistol and backup striker gear is well known. Much of this was due to peacetime economies, but excessive secrecy and far too little communications between the Naval Torpedo Station and the Fleet were also to blame, as well as the reluctance of the Bureau of Ordnance to accept good evidence of defects. The result was that it was not officially announced until August 1942 that the standard submarine torpedo Mark 14 ran 10 feet (3 m) below its depth setting and not until June 1943 that the magnetic pistol was ordered to be disabled. However, long before this time, many submarine commanders were putting to sea per orders with activated pistols only to deactivate them once out of sight of land. The contact exploder faults were finally rectified in September 1943 but magnetic exploders were distrusted as late as thirty years after the war ended.
Tactical nukes are funny that way. The delivery maneuver used by medium bombers like the B-47 and fighter-bombers like the F-105 to safely* deliver nuclear gravity bombs from a moderately low-level ingress route (avoiding radar visibility) is called the “idiot’s loop”. Probably with good reason.
*safely to themselves… very unsafely for the target
I’m under the impression that it was the U.S. Navy’s deployment of the proximity (VT) fuze that made the “wall of steel” so deadly. The U.S. Navy wouldn’t even share the VT with the U.S. Army.
My understanding is that capture of one or more Hawaian island was contemplated post-Midway.
Even if not, packing Midway to the rafters with weapons and supplies would have vastly bettered
JN logistical capacity, and strategic fighting potential.
JN also assumed the US Pacific Fleet would be in relatively much worse shape rather than much
better shape after the battle; holding Midway would have been no challenge against a carrierless USN.
The US would have wanted overwhelming air strength to protect its greatest naval base, and after PH
would probably not have settled for less than thousands if its capital ships were to be stationed there.
As I said, MI was an unsinkabler carrier, and attention the JN was forced to devote to it contributed
to the outcome.
Pinning them down in Hawaii would have furthered JN designs elsewhere, such as the Solomons.
Was the USA down to two or one carriers when…Admiral Fletcher?..took his out of harms way to become a “fleet in being”?
How long until more US carriers were in operation?
At Guadalcanal, the US on two occasions was down to one operational carrier west of Hawaii. But this was something the Japanese were not able to capitalize in. The US at any time had one carrier in reserve (Atlantic side?)
Sort of, the use of proximity fuzes in Europe by the US Army was finally allowed just before the Ardennes Offensive. While the proximity fuze certainly was of great value, it wouldn’t have been much use without the massive increases in the number of AAA weapons mounted on warships during the war. For example, the AAA armament of the USS Arizona when sunk at Pearl Harbor was 8x.50cal machine guns and 12x5in/25 AAA guns. Her sistership the USS Pennsylvania had the same armament at the start of the war, however by the end of the war her AAA armament was 16x5in/38 DP guns, 40x40mm Bofors and 71x20mm Oerlikons.
Not with any degree of seriousness if at all.
Not by very much. Midway was packed to the rafters by the US during the battle. It an atoll, there isn’t a lot of room to pack things.
And? The Battle of Midway didn’t happen on Dec 8, 1941.
Thousands? I find even a single thousand very hard to believe.
The Solomons actually gives a very good idea of how successful using Midway to bomb Pearl Harbor would be. Rabaul, from which the Japanese were bombing Guadalcanal was both closer than Midway is to Hawaii and had vastly better airfields than it would even be possible to build on Midway. At the height of the battle Henderson Field was being successfully defended by a grand totalof 47 fighters, 23 tactical bombers, and 12 medium bombers.
There’s a really good article here on the economics of the war, down at the bottom of the article the author shows the results of a ‘reverse Midway’ in which all 3 of the US carriers at the battle are sunk without any losses by the Japanese. Even with that,
In addition to Dissonance’s refutation above, I’ll respond further to this:
My point was not that the US would want to station additional fighters there. My point was, rather, that the US already had stationed lots of fighters permanently in Hawaii, specifically because of the Pearl Harbor attack. After Pearl, it would have been politically and militarily risky to leave Hawaii without substantial fighter cover, and as far as I know it was not in fact stripped of fighters.
Those fighters were doing little for the war effort aside from defense; their pilots would have been perfectly happy to get a crack at the enemy, had the Japanese used Midway’s poor aircraft capacity to wage long-range, lightweight attacks on the strongest American position in the Pacific.
Atoll packing space of course depends on atoll size—google “Truk (Chuuk)” on that note.
Let us focus on packaging horizontal bombers.
Midway admittedly is much smaller than Truk. However, only one of its two islands,
the smaller one, had an airfield as of 6/42, and that one airfield was base to 107 planes,
including 4 B-26 and 17 B-17. See link, footnote #31:Marines at Midway
Now, length x wingspan of the B-26, B-17 and the (Japanese)G-4M horizontal bomber
were respectively 4189, 7800 and 500 square feet, so Midway should easily have been
able to accommodate well over 100 G-4M just on its smaller island. And then there are
the fighters, torpedo bombers, and dive bombers. By 1942 war at sea standards that
would be a lot more than “not very much.”
I cited losses to give proprtion to mention of pre-war strength.
Yes thousands, considering it would take only one bomb to sink a carrier, and with
luck possibly any other kind ship, or to incinerate a fuel tank depot not underground
and covered by a cement slab. And the need would only increase for each additional
US carrier lost in an alternate history scenario.
Do you honestly think the US would have failed to put 1000 planes on Guadalcanal,
inventory and logistics permitting? As it was, the Japanese started the campaign
with only 39 fighters, 32 horizontal bombers, and 16 dive bombers, and so were heavily
outnumbered given the defensive multiplier effect the US enjoyed by fighting over its own base.
In a different vein, Guadalcanal was not a naval base with warships docked, boilers
cold, and with fuel tanks, machine shops, warehouses, hangars, barracks etc. immobile
in the open. The targets afforded the Japanese at Guadalcanal were smaller, camouflaged,
and dug in enough to withstand battleship bombardment.
Also consider: JN surface ships rarely if ever approached Guadalcanal except at night,
despite the paltry 39 US bombers; JN ships were on the move whereas the whole point
of a naval base is that it affords relief from the need to move; an anchorage is useless
as a base if fit for service only at night, as Pearl Harbor would have been without 1000s
of air defenders in the scenario we are discussing.
My point was that a few 100 fighters would be inadequate defence.
Offensive duty would only increase the need for more fighters.
Addressed in my reply to Dissonance. I should add that even the possibility
of attack by 100+ enemy bombers with fighter escort would make it mandatory
to reserve 1000 fighters for defence at all times. Plus we had literally no idea
what the JN had in its pipeline, and it had already delivered a real shock with
its torpedos, which would remain the best in the world throughout the war.
You’re emphasizing the wrong things. For starters it was
Possible future operations aren’t quite serious. The other point is
Which is in keeping with their philosophy of a Mahanian decisive battle that would settle the war one way or the other in a single battle. That was what they were looking for at Midway, to decisively defeat the US Navy in the Pacific. The island itself wasn’t much more than a lure to draw the US carriers out to battle. It certainly wasn’t a stepping stone for a planned assault on the Hawaiian Islands. There’s a reason you won’t find more than references to possible future operation against Hawaii; even in the high of victory fever the Japanese high command wasn’t optimistic enough to seriously work on such an operation. Hawaii was very heavily defended; from the outset of the war there were two full strength triangular divisions on the islands and Oahu was fully covered by large amounts of coastal artillery up to the size of 16" rifles and 240mm howitzers. The Japanese were hard pressed to come up with enough shipping to support the operations they actually had underway, much less finding enough to transport a force large enough to try a landing anywhere in Hawaii. Had things gone all tits up at Midway, there is every likelihood that it would have become Wake Island 2.0, the Japanese had only brought along 5,000 troops to try to take the island.
I’m quite aware of Truk and have no need to google it. As you say, it is much larger than Midway, so I have no idea why you are mentioning it to begin with. Further, your idea that you can decide the number of G4Ms you can pack into an airfield by determining the number of square feet they occupy compared to B-26 and B-17s is on very unsound ground. All of this is immaterial at any rate, Rabaul was able to support much more than 100 Bettys and was entirely unable to knock out Henderson Field.
You’ve yet to explain where you are getting a number of thousands from. I’m sorry, the number is absurd. Hawaii isn’t a giant fuel tank waiting for a single spark to explode the entire island. There would be no need to station 10 fighters for each Betty that you posit could be based and supported at Midway. Henderson Field was defended from those numbers without the need for even a hundred fighters, much less several thousand.
Do you honestly think that Japan wouldn’t have put billions of Bettys on Rabaul, inventory and logistics permitting? No? Your question is equally pointless. You are also being extremely disingenuous in listing the planes Japan began the campaign with and calling them heavily outnumbered. Know how many planes on Henderson Field the US began the Guadalcanal campaign with? Zero. Want to know how many planes the Japanese were operating out from Rabaul at the height of the campaign? It wasn’t 39 fighters, 32 horizontal bombers, and 16 dive bombers.
A string of non sequiturs doesn’t amount to a reason for thousands of fighters being needed. You’ve yet to provide a shred of evidence to back up such an absurd figure.
On what planet? Seriously, where are you pulling this figure of 10 fighters needed for defense at all time from the mere possibility of an attack by 1 bomber from? It certainly isn’t a rule of thumb that any combatant in WW2 used or even thought of using at any time.
Every air force in World War II would have regarded the possibility of attack by your escorted bomber force – from a known base – as a mandatory requirement to attack that base, not over-garrison fighters.
But enough about that. What’s been missing from this sub-part of the discussion so far is any citation regarding the relative strength of Hawaii versus a putative Japanese-held Midway.
[QUOTE=CommbinedFleet]
Finally, let’s talk about air superiority. If you’re going to take Hawaii, you’ve got to secure the airspace over it. Unfortunately for the Japanese; by August 1942 Hawaii was crawling with U.S. aircraft. In fact, by April 1, 1942, there were already 275 U.S. aircraft in the Hawaiian islands, with projected arrivals to amount to more than 350. In the face of a likely invasion, that strength could be rapidly augmented. In fact, Saratoga’s air group of 90 aircraft could have been added to the island’s defenses as early as June 8th. Thus, as Willmott has noted, “With so many land-based aircraft operational on well-dispersed airfields on Oahu, the Japanese had no realistic hope of being able to fight for and then secure air supremacy over Pearl Harbor.” (Willmott, “The Barrier and the Javelin” p. 66). The truth was that Kido Butai, even at its finest moments in early 1942, was still only strong enough to raid Hawaii, not project power over it for extended periods of time.
“Well,” you say, “the Japanese could use Midway as an advance base and establish air supremacy over Hawaii from there.” There are two problems with this. First, Midway makes a miserable advance base. It is about the size of a postage stamp, has no fresh water, is possessed of only a relatively small harbor, and has room for but one small airfield. At best it could operate an air contingent of about 90-100 aircraft. In other words, there was absolutely no chance of using Midway as the sort of major logistics center (a la Truk or Rabaul) for further operations down the Hawaiian chain. Midway was, at best, an outpost.
Second, Midway is too far from Hawaii. Even if the Japanese had been able to install an airgroup at Midway, and keep it supplied, it had no chance of exerting a powerful influence on Hawaii, since it is nearly 1,300 miles from Oahu. During the Solomons campaign, the Japanese (who had the longest-ranged fighter in the Pacific in the A6M5 Zero) found it nearly impossible to exert air power from Rabaul to Guadalcanal, which was 650 miles away. By itself, then, Midway was useless as an advance base. If Hawaii’s airpower was to be reduced, and Oahu taken, then the Japanese would have to do it using carrier-borne airpower and seaborne troops – a virtual impossibility for all the reasons just discussed.
[/QUOTE]
The guys at CombinedFleet are serious wonks on the Japanese fleet and the Pacific war, with impeccable credentials. Their opinion on this can be regarded as authoritative.
Two of them wrote the Shattered Sword book mentioned earlier in this thread.
I find even a single thousand very hard to believe.