Good point. He had ample justification to go to war but the fact is, he didn’t.
The country was still in isolationism and the politicians didn’t want it.
I mean, Hitler is bombing the hell out of England and we don’t even help out.
In fact, I just read that Pearl Harbor wasn’t even necessary because Japan
could have taken all the islands w/o a fight from us we were so pacive.
Until Dec 7th.
Hitler made the dumbest misake of his life declaring war on U.S. LOL.
HEY GUYS - Another worthy thread is could Patton have gone to Moscow like
he wanted to and could MacArthur have taken China?
I believe Patton would have gotten to Moscow but would have been cut
off and surrounded like the Germans in Stalingrad, which was about 2,000
miles from the German border. The Germans stretched their lines out too
far enabling the Russians to shoot the gaps and surround them. Over 90,000
troops surrended.
Napolean made it to Moscow but withdew. Mobody was there. Everyone took
off.
The only way Patton could have held Russia was by using nukes early. Hell,
he couldn’t even go thru 600 miles in France w/o running out of gas and
supplies which is what allowed Bastone to happen. We were bogged down
in defensive positions because we were out of fuel.
So how could Patton expect to go 3,000 miles to Moscow and hold it?
Someone wrote an alt-history short story where it was Doolittle who put 2 and 2 together that Pearl would be the IJN’s first target, and trained his B-25 crews to perform daring low level bombing runs. His planes go out early on Dec 7th (they’ve been doing morning patrols for weeks), find the Japanese carriers, and bomb the hey out of them before they can launch their attack (Doolittle dies in the process). But instead of getting a very pissed off electorate like we did in this timeline, the reaction of the American public to a bunch of Japanese ships preemptively bombed near Hawaii before they can bomb Pearl is a collective meh, and the US isn’t as successful in the Pacific as they actually were, despite a bunch of perfectly undamaged battlewagons. War dragged on to 1948 IIRC.
Interesting but the movie Midway pointed out that it was a sub commander who came up with the Doolittle raid. I know you said that was just an alt-history story.
Remember FDR says, I like sub commanders. They don’t have time for bull.
Bull Halsey said the most important weapons of the war were the plane, radar, sub and bull dozer. My uncle operated a bull dozer and built air strips all over
the pacific as a Sea Bee.
Beat me to it. I just finished reading Shattered Sword and it’s excellent, although it focuses almost entirely on the Japanese side of the battle.
Not true. We got our asses handed to us in the Java Sea, suffered some disastrous setbacks in the waters around Guadalcanal, and Santa Cruz could be considered a loss as well.
Lots from that, and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, and at least one Japanese movie.
They did have a separate task group of 4 heavy cruisers to shell Midway, but they were recalled after the disaster. When a US submarine showed up, 2 collided in the disarray and our planes later sunk one of them, the Mikuma.
The 2nd wave planes were already armed to attack ships, but Nagumo disobeyed Yamamoto’s order by having them re-armed for a 2nd strike on Midway. When the US task force was (belatedly) spotted, he ordered them re-re-armed, but they were a long way from getting planes spotted for takeoff on the flight deck when they ran out of time.
The only American torpedo hit of the battle was by the night-flying Catalinas on an oiler, which somehow managed to stay in formation.
As for the B-17s, we should have know by then that you can’t hit moving ships with bombs from high altitude. You can disrupt carrier operations tho, so they should have dropped larger numbers of smaller bombs over a longer period of time. Afterwards (I’m talking about during the main battle), they should have roared in at low level to support the torpedo planes by drawing fire, shooting at the Zeroes and strafing the carriers’ AA defenses (one B-17 did do the latter).
Like Coral Ridge, Santa Cruz was a strategic victory for the U.S. That’s not getting your ass kicked.
Again, the point is, after having our entire Navy crippled at Pearl we did pretty well thereafter and defeated the Japs.
We also took Gaudacanal.
Vice-Admiral Halsey had, after the strategic success of the Battle of Santa Cruz, once again many problems to solve but few tools to work out a solution.
Guadacanal was a campaign series of naval battles the Japs lost in the end. In the first one it was mostly US escort ships damaged and the Jap commander didn’t know where the carriers were.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t just a battle, it was a campaign; a campaign they could not hope to win, as the material superiority of their adversary, and the willingness of the Americans to accept stunning naval losses to hold the island gradually eroded the vital cruiser and destroyer strengths of the Japanese Navy.
We took the island with the Jap fleet protecting it in the beginning.
We won the Guadalcanal campaign, but we lost several naval battles along the way. Especially the first, when the Japanese sunk four cruisers and 2? destroyers, and essentially forced the American carriers to withdraw. For a while, the Japanese Navy controlled the seas, though the Marines managed to hold onto the ground they took.
Battle of Eastern Solomon Islands of Guadacanal Campaign.
With their first major offensive on Guadalcanal unsuccessful, Imperial Japan needed to reinforce their weakened position on Guadalcanal and bring in fresh troops if another offensive was to be mounted against the American marines that had captured the island
As does hindsight. Just the simple fact of knowing how many US carriers are going to be in the battle would make a huge difference in how a person wargames a battle.
Hell, I have never seen a wargame of Gettysburg end up remotely like how the battle took place. Anyone who studied the battle knows what will and what won’t work.
For more fun, read about how the Japanese cheated when they ran wargames of the battle before it took place (Shattered Sword, again).
A bigger problem for the Japanese CAP was not so much that they were all refueling, but rather that a) they were low on 20mm ammo and the .30 caliber wasn’t as useful in bringing down enemy planes and b) the bomber squad that actually hit the carriers wasn’t being as nice about getting shot down. They either flew in formation where the tail gunners could make trouble for the attacking enemy pilots or flew in such a crazy manner to be a hard target.
This is described in Shattered Sword, and its another one of those moments where you can almost hear the collective Japanese Navy go “ummm, this isn’t fun anymore.”
If memory serves, there was one instance where the US carriers were on scene at the start of the battle and hit the Japanese carriers when their air groups were off attacking Midway (sound familiar?). Two Japanese carriers were sunk, but the referees countermanded the results and refloated at least one.