Famously the Japanese aircraft carriers Zuikaku and Shoukaku were supposed to be used in the Midway Operation but due to the Battle of the Coral Sea both were damaged with the Shokaku requiring serious port time while Zuikaku having lost a lot of planes and pilots. The famous counter-factual I see reported everywhere is if the remaining aircraft of the Shokaku had been transferred to the relatively undamaged Zuikaku, that would have been enough to allow Zuikaku to fight at Midway along with the other four carriers giving a 5 to 3 advantage over the American Carriers.
However I am curious why the Japanese simply didn’t use the two carriers allotted to the (ultimately pointless) Aleutian Islands campaign. Wikipedia says it was two light carriers that participated but from what I understand carrier Junyō was outfitted to be a fleet carrier not a light carrier. In addition the light carriers Hosho and Zuiho were attached to cover the Japanese bombardment force but ultimately didn’t see any use since the bombardment force was never actually deployed.
How practical would it have been to either use the two carriers in the Aleutian Islands campaign to back up the Midway force, or to use the two light carriers of the bombardment force to at least provide fighter cover for the Japanese four main fleet carriers?
Someone (paging @TokyoBayer) will be along with more detail, but the short answer is that only one of the four (Zuihō, attached to the Invasion Force) was at all suitable for service with Kido Butai — and it wasn’t carrying its full complement of aircraft. Of the others, Hōshō (the IJN’s first carrier) was far too old and slow, and could only support a handful of obsolete planes; Junyō (a converted ocean liner) was judged too slow; and Ryūjō had elevators that couldn’t manage dive bombers.
Aside from the above, Kido Butai wasn’t just a collection of ships: it was an integrated force that had trained and operated together since before the war, and merging other carriers wasn’t seen as practical.
But the bottom line: Yamamoto decreed that four carriers would be enough, since his plans said the USN wouldn’t be aware of their presence until the attack began. So it was written; so they were undone.
If the Alaskan Operation had not gone through with, realistically would those two carriers have been attached to Midway or would they have simply been tasked somewhere else?
With complete foresight of forces involved, could Hosho and Zuiho been used much better in assisting the Japanese carrier forces even with just fighter cover or would that still have ultimately not mattered much?
IMHO, Hosho had a very small air group, and probably couldn’t recover, refuel, and launch very quickly. She might draw an attack that otherwise hit the fleet carriers. Zuiho would be more useful. But the problem was all those disorganized attacks from Midway, at different times, from different directions, from different altitudes. The fighter screen was dispersed horizontally, vertically, and temporally, so even with Zuiho’s fighters added to the screen, they’ll be all over the sky, and in the hangar being refueled. Few if any would be mixing it up with the Dauntlesses at 1020.
OTOH, Zuiho is another target. From 20,000 feet, she looked like a fleet carrier.
First, a semi-nitpicking correction: Hōshō was the IJN’s first purpose-built carrier, analogous to the USN’s Ranger. Just wanted to get that out of the way before someone jumps on it.
Anyway …
Perhaps, but there were doctrinal (for want of a better word) issues that would discourage such an approach. Exercise and early war experience had proved the value of homogeneous formations, at least as far as Kido Butai was concerned; and as tended to happen in the IJN, this morphed into immutable law. Post-Midway — out of necessity — they did employ mixed carrier groups, but at this point the benefit of adding different flight decks and air groups would likely not be considered worth the effort.
And remember, up until three weeks or so before the Midway forces sortied Shokaku and Zuikaku were expected to sail with them. That’s not much time to integrate new elements into a system which was so finely tuned.
The IJN never developed a good doctrine for CAP coverage, and it was completely disorganized and undisciplined at Midway. There wasn’t any central command, something the USN also lacked at this stage of the war. The IJN didn’t even have a doctrine of having other ships provide AA help for their carriers. Everyone was on their own.
The problem with counterfactuals is that the changes necessary to allow the counterfactual would usually fundamentally change the situation. Had the Japanese been that carefully planning the operation, they simply wouldn’t have attempted it in the first place. Actually, though, they were so arrogant at this stage of the war, that they would likely have heard the odds and figured that nothing would change.
As for the question of what would have happened if the meaningless AI campaign weren’t included, those carriers would probably have been thrown into somewhere but not likely with the kidobutai because they would have limited operations. As @OttoDaFe said, they had a revolutionary doctrine of integrating their carriers and including lesser carriers would have been unthinkable at this stage of the war.
Following up on @OttoDaFe 's excellent analysis, it’s needs to be noted that at this stage, the USN was still operating its task forces as independent units of one or two carriers, in accordance to prewar doctrine. The US had believed that separating the carriers provided a better chance of survival of at least part of the fleet and had not attempted to integrate the carriers into a larger, unified fighting force.
The IJN would launch strikes with the multiple groups from up to six platforms of the three types of planes; fighters, dive bombers and torpedo bombers, all of which flew at different speeds and altitudes, and get them all over the target at the same time. The USN wasn’t able to do that until well into 1943 or 1944. The US couldn’t even coordinate air groups from individual task forces, as can be seen by the actual attack.
IIRSSC (If I Remember Shattered Sword Correctly) the Yorktown air group did the best job on 4 June by putting up escort Wildcats first along with CAP, then their Devastator squadron followed by the Dauntlesses, then bringing the escort back down to the deck for a fill up of gas tanks before sending them out on strike. This got them to the target at more-or-less the same time, though uncoordinated in activity due to their lack of contact before getting to the target. Plus, they had one squadron of SBDs in the air scouting, so less pressure on the elevators & spotting personnel.
Hornet and Enterprise were a hot mess by comparison.
I also had one other thought closer to the main point of the thread. Kido Butai timed things so that they would be out of range of Midway’s scout planes at dusk on 3 June but within striking range of Midway at dawn on 4 June. This implies a certain minimum speed to be able to cover enough sea under cover of darkness.
Did any of the other carriers have both the speed and the endurance to keep up with the fleet carriers on the schedule required by the Midway attack plan? I’m sure the light carriers could have kept up with the fleet carriers overnight, but would they have enough fuel remaining for combat operations the next day?
But on the whole, I agree with the general sentiment of this thread - even if the IJN could have used light carriers, they would not have. They had a doctrine they had developed for years that six months of war had perfectly validated, except for that one little dustup in the Coral Sea by the two newbies that nevertheless gave much worse than they got, sinking two US fleet carriers! Unfortunately, one of those US carriers had to be sunk again and again and again…
Totally irrelevant detour: What ship has been officially reported sunk by the enemy the most? I think Yorktown is in the running. Maybe not by name, but the IJN thought they sunk her at Coral Sea, then again at Midway. Both times they were wrong. If it wasn’t for I-168 they might have done so several more times during the war.
They actually thought they sunk her twice at Midway before I-168 finished her off. Hiryu launched two strikes, both of which found Yorktown and reported a sinking. Damage control had done such a good job between the attacks that the second strike fliers thought they had found a different carrier.
Here’s another interesting detour: did Japan’s high command think that carrier sinking reports from combat units were accurate? Given the actual sinkings of Lexington and Yorktown, plus the “sinkings” of Yorktown and the torpedo hit that Saratoga took to keep her out of action at Midway, did the IJN think the US Navy was down to Wasp and Ranger by mid-1942?
Based on longevity, I’d guess that Enterprise probably held that dubious honor. But I have no idea whether anyone has gathered the relevant statistics.
If there hadn’t been problems spotting the second deckload — the fighters and torpedo planes — Enterprisemight have gotten off something resembling a coordinated strike (and who knows, it may also have stayed together, meaning that VT-6 could have had fighter support).
The USN was at least making an attempt: they had better technology (radar, of course, along with radios that actually worked and a dedicated fighter channel), and were beginning to develop the role that eventually became the Fighter Director Officer (FDO).
But it took a while: I recall reading many years ago that during one of the battles off Guadalcanal the Enterprise FDO would tell the fighters “look off the starboard bow” or “look off the port beam” — giving the target bearing relative to the ship with no consideration to where the fighters might be heading.
I’ve read Shattered Sword since our last discussion on this topic and I believe the authors made a good point in that book. They wrote that the Japanese Navy in WWII should have divided all of their battle plans into two groups: those that were important enough to send the entire carrier force to and those that were not. And then they should have rejected all of the latter plans.
The point was that Japan should not have been splitting up their carrier fleet. Doing so made it possible for the American carrier fleet to achieve local parity (or superiority) over a portion of the Japanese carrier fleet.
The reason Japan didn’t follow this principle was that they were feeling the pressure of time moving on. Japan understood it had to win the war quickly because America would overwhelm them in any long war. They had the proverbial six months to run wild. And they were trying to get the most they could out of that window. So they split up their carriers and sent them off on different missions in the same time period - like attacking the Aleutians and Midway simultaneously.
They should have cancelled the Aleutians operation and sent all of their carriers towards Midway. And by the same token, they should have send all of their carriers to the Coral Sea operation or cancelled that operation if it wasn’t deemed important enough to send all of their carriers.
The WWII Japanese Navy seems to have had an affinity for Rube Goldberg-type plans, splitting their forces into a bunch of pieces moving independently but all arriving together at the same time in the same spot, in secret from the enemy. With little consideration for the possibility of anything going wrong (which is pretty likely, during a war).
Some of this may have been a cultural bias.
I know American Navy ships survived damage where Japanese Navy ships didn’t, due to more emphasis & training on damage-control teams in the American Navy. I’ve heard that this may be due to a reluctance of Japanese Naval commanders to consider the possibility of losing the ship. (Might also be due to the American Navy’s shortage of ships, after the Pearl Harbor losses.)
I’ve also read that the complicated Japanese plans were needed to make sure that each piece of the Japanese Navy was given their part in the operation – otherwise they would try to kill the operation unless they got a piece of the action. Not an uncommon thing in military hierarchies (or business or government ones, for that matter).
Most alt-hist is unrealistic, as it posits the people involved acting counter to how they really were.
But interesting for all that.
I don’t think one more small old carrier would have turned the battle.
Two possible things would have:
better scouting by the IJN. They certainly wanted to, but sadly for them, they didn’t make it a priority.
Using the battleships as bait. The IJN did that late in the war- however, at the time of Midway, even though mentally they knew the BBs were obsolescent, in their hearts they could not accept that. Wargames show this is a winner, but it is doubtful they could have brought themselves to do it.
It was also a matter of temperament and doctrine: offensive power was paramount, everything else — including survivability — was secondary.
Consider the aircraft carrier, for example: if the enclosed hangar deck couldn’t accommodate a decent air group, they added a second hangar deck. Which raised the ship’s profile, making it top-heavy and unstable. Which meant they couldn’t include an armored flight deck (Royal Navy) or hangar deck (USN). Which made the entire structure vulnerable to penetration by general-purpose bombs, not to mention armor-piercing bombs. And so on and so on and so on.